One Paragraph Movie Review: The Wedding Banquet

Two hundred and forty-first film: Hsi Yen, or “The Wedding Banquet” in Chinese. Ang Lee’s 1993 film is about a Taiwanese gay man whose American partner encourages to marry a woman so she can stay in the country, with a bonus side-effect of stopping his parents signing him up to match-making services. This movie is a lot like early nineties fashion — a bit awkward, but ultimately pretty comfortable. Look, the acting is terrible and the storyline has been done a thousand times, but it’s charming as all get-out and cute as a dumpling. It neatly shows how prickly and fraught it can be for gay people to hide their sexuality from their parents and — granted in a relatively enlightened and loving middle-class setting — how (often) unnecessary. It also shows a wedding banquet I badly want to be at in stretchy clothing, reveals a post-banquet tradition that makes me want to both play mah-jongg and lock my hotel room door, and chucks a few additional interesting nuggets of Chinese culture my way. Completely un-preachy and — I’m hugely reluctant to admit as a tough hard cool person — genuinely heartwarming. Noice. Three matrimonial lobsters out of five.