Wedding banquet review: four -way restart has more conspiracy than heart

Gay marriage was illegal when Ang Lee released 1993 “The wedding banquet”, “ A romantic dramatic from New York on a Queer Taiwanese man, his white male partner and the Chinese immigrant whom he marries to appease his conservative parents. But Lee, wise of the way in which the heart of stammer, could not look to the public with bromures like Love is love. This small insured masterpiece (Only Lee's second film) insisted that love is also selfish, injuring, short -sighted and confusing, and that many of his injuries have just worried about what foreigners think.

Today, the cultural battle lines have been redesigned, therefore the director Andrew Ahn (“Spa Night”, “Fire Island”) restarted “the wedding banquet” with more characters and higher issues. Team the longtime co-author of Lee James SchamusHe has concocted an outdoor plot which is all complications and the little soul.

Instead of a couple, we now have two: the little friends Chris (Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-chan), and the Angela friends (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone). The quartet lives at Lee's home in Seattle, with the women of the main house and the guys in a bunker similar to a barn in the courtyard. During the film, they will fight, kiss and make jokes, and will eventually walk in the aisle with the bad person.

Chris and Angela are codependent friends from university. They briefly connected to adolescence, probably as part of the first -year orientation (DIS), although their sexual fluidity is blurred. What is clear is that they are twin souls, two flip children and emotionally risks forever children in adults, like the millennial language of dialogue could say. Today, everyone can legally marry their loved ones. They just don't want to. The blame has gone from society to personal inertia.

Their respective partners, however, want to settle. Min, an art student from the fabric, already has a engagement ring in his pocket. The scion of a Corean Millionaire fashion conglomerate, Min cashes the vouchers of her grandmother, Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-Jung), while dodging his request to take over as a creative director. “You don't work for the company – you are The company, ”she insists.

Meanwhile, Lee is a bohemian goddess who spends a large part of her gardening time. (The Fleurie Tricot Pests of Gladstone are a fun contrast with the rare Metallica Roadie de Tran – an excellent work at all levels by the costumeur Matthew Simonelli.) A help worker for young LGBTQ + on a quest for blocking ICT to wear children from his own, Lee, Lee endured two in vitro -fetal and painfully, his partner of his partner to have children in the whole. Angela tense the relationship with her own mother, May (Joan ChenDiva-Fabulous), an ally seeing which is closer to its PFLAG friends, did it in maternal heat either. The most credible character, Angela is terrified to play mom herself; It is improvisation without a net. (A big comic beat comes when May consoles her daughter by cooing that Angela may not be as horrible of a mom – she could be worse.)

Min needs a green card. Lee needs money for a third stroke on IVF. Chris and Angela need more track for their inertia. Thus, Min and Lee reflect on an unusual proposal: an exchange of partner that will solve a set of problems while creating an accumulation of others. For reasons which are too exciting to explain, Min and Angela must marry and engage in the cunning when Ja-Young arrives to investigate the question of whether the fiancée of her grandson is a gold trigger. The four tracks are not pulled by their heart strings but by the machinations of a plot that directs them from one artificial scene to another, just to point the skid marks and call them a sketch of the new American family.

In 2025, unlike 1993, Ahn and Schamus did not hold for granted that foreigners like Min want to live in America. “Your trains are so slow!” He groaned. Rich, Charming and Pop-Pretty (his skin care diet is a fun runner), Min only wants to stay in the United States for Chris, which is too much pressure to put Callow from Yang and a subscribed role. Despite these limits, it is one of the best parts of Yang. Now that he has established himself as bigger than life on “Saturday Night Live”, he has the confidence necessary to play a human being.

Han knows that he must exaggerate Daffy Naivete de Min to get us to join his zeal to live in a small hut with Chris not engaged. He and Chen give the less naturalistic and delicious performance of the film. (“My own daughter, marry a man!” Chen in the progressive groans of Chen in decapitation.) These are the only actors who have internalized that these are screw stuff, despite the realistic cinematography that launches a wet jute canvas on nonsense.

The cast is strong enough to sell us on the idea of ​​the love of the film, even when it folds conventionality into a balloon animal. But his conception of the mega-rows is really false. The lack of min ego would be unusual if it was only the upper middle class, but as the only heir to a line that makes the head, it is absurd. I am not saying that Min should be a privileged twit. But if he can stimulate such casual purchase IVF as a series of beers, then the film must respect the spectator enough to answer obvious follow-up questions: how does this medical treatment of marriage for the medical treatment for the medical nonsense? If Min is desperate to escape the fashion affairs of his grandmother, why does he sew an impressive jacket for his Hanbok? And, at least, why can't guys rent their own house next door?

The general tone looks like Ahn asking us to trust him to operate this modern romance. But it barely includes really true things as difficult conversations on errors and forgiveness. There are no connection scenes between Min and Angela. These long -term friends suddenly act like other coots. More than more, AHN has an over-the-corporal ICT to cut large confrontations. It is as if we were invited to this house to be ordered to implement.

Lily Gladstone, on the left, and Kelly Marie Tran in the film “The Wedding Banquet”.

(Luka Cyprian / Bleecker Street)

When the drama is the most convincing, the camera rather chooses to focus on the youngster's grandmother looking at young people from a window. Events affect her Ja-Young especially, but we are stuck to look at her and whatever the thoughts she is too reserved to express. I receive this young person, who won an Oscar from the support actress five years ago for “Minari”, is a lucky talisman. However, the way in which the film strength at times when it does not belong to it to feel like an albatrossess – especially when he forgets that Lee de Gladstone exists for an insulting section and never gives this more central character a chance to speak his peace.

There is something in the aesthetics of the house, in the gravity of the expressions of Gladstone and Youn – trapped in scenes where dead air is filled by the sound of birds – which gives to what this film with good heart seems embarrassed that it is a comedy. When the gags arrive, they are clumsy and desperate: an explosion of discordant vomiting, some shenanigans in a courthouse. Humor stands out like a clogged at a party that flows with so many clumsy thoughts that when it is finally time to speak, they exclude something rude.

As it is strange that everyone involved here like the 1993 film so much that they have redone it – or in the case of Schamus, rewrites it – without much of its cultural spirit and focused on the characters. Ahn obtains a few laughs in its representation of a half -cooked Korean wedding ceremony half -cooked with Chris walking with a wooden duck and the unlucky couple that is trampled on with chestnuts and dates, a symbology that no one presents completely. It is an interesting way to argue that traditions must be re -examined.

But I still prefer an Ang Lee punchline delivered personally to his original “wedding banquet”. Playing a reception guest surrounded by drunk Hijinks, he quips: “You attend 5,000 years of sexual repression.” To think about it, this overhaul has no banquet. There are just leftovers.