THE WEDDING BANQUET

Rip It Up, Issue 200, 1 April 1994, Page 28

THE WEDDING BANQUET

Director: Ang Lee

Like Chen Kiage’s Farewell my Concubine, Ang Lee’s second feature tackles a subject that the Chinese have been slow to accept - the role and indeed, the very existence of gays and a gay lifestyle. But both films are more than just exposes of an alternative lifestyle: if Concubine gave us a whole panorama of Chinese politics, then Wedding Banquet has some shrewd observations to make on broader cultural issues and ironies in the coming together of East and West. The Wedding Banquet has a gay ChineseAmerican man forced to go through a mock marriage with his Chinese tenant, with the total compliance of his American boyfriend - all to appease his parents, visiting from Taiwan. This sparks off some predictably hilarious scenes, from the ‘cleansing’ of the flat (beefcake images being torn down and re-

placed by Chinese scrolls) to the extended wedding banquet that gives the film its title. Although the pacing is snappy, the characters are beautifully observed: Winston Chao and Mitchell Lichtenstein are great as the gay couple and May Chin as Wei Wei takes to a life of duplicity with style. Whether Ang Lee really resolves the questions of identity that he describes as the aim of his film I’m not so sure-but the film is a thousand times more off-beat and entertaining than Peter Weir’s Green Card, which shares one of its major themes. Be prepared for some testing and almost indecipherable sub-titles. WILLIAM DART