In the over 30 years since Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet hit theatres in 1993, so much has changed for LGBTQ2S+ people. Marriage legalization, less stigma, the ability to have children and families are all recent developments that have changed what “chosen family” means.
Lee’s 1993 film centers around a bisexual Taiwanese immigrant Wai-Tung and his gay American partner Simon. To placate his traditionally-minded parents, Wai-Tung decides to marry Wei-Wei, an artist from China in need of a green card. For the threesome, it was a perfect arrangement: Wai-Tung and Simon could continue to date in secret while Wei-Wei gets to stay in America. All of that is complicated when Wai-Tung’s parents decide to visit and throw their son a big wedding and Wei-Wei becomes pregnant with Wai-Tung’s baby. In the end, Wai-Tung’s parents accept Simon and their son’s relationship, leaving the new family of four to live happily ever after.
Andrew Ahn’s 2025 version of The Wedding Banquet covers much of the same ground: Lesbian couple Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone) enter into a marriage ploy with their best friends and housemates Chris (Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-chan) when they’ve hit a wall on their IVF journey. In an ill-conceived plan to solve all their problems, Min and Angela decide to get married. Min, the heir to a Korean multinational, would pay for the couple’s IVF while securing a green card to stay in the U.S. with Chris.
But despite the similarities, Ahn’s film takes the ideas of queer relationships, chosen family and Asian traditions and complicates them for a thoroughly modern look at love and setting down roots.
For starters, Ahn is working in a much different context than 1993. “Gay people can get married now in the U.S., but now that we can, it becomes a question of, well, do we actually want to?” the director tells RepresentASIAN Project.
Plus, queer people starting families is common nowadays. Still, there’s a lot of intentionality that goes into queer family planning, and any bit of reluctance becomes a massive obstacle. “We can’t just whoopsie daisy a baby into existence,” Ahn explains. “I wanted to take these two elements of queer family building and explore them in a way that’s building off of Ang Lee’s film.”
“Gay people can get married now in the U.S., but now that we can, it becomes a question of, well, do we actually want to?”
The result: A refreshing take on a queer rom-com. Here, coming out or coming to terms with one’s sexuality isn’t the problem. Instead, much of the drama is driven by the desire to build a home. While the original Wedding Banquet used the marriage plot for survival and concealment, Ahn’s uses it as a way to build a family.
Gladstone’s Lee, for example, is a member of the Duwamish Tribe and owns her Seattle home, seeing it as a way of reclaiming her people’s land. She’s desperate to have a family, but she can’t bear the idea of selling her home to afford more IVF. And Min is caught between the chosen family he found in America and making his family back home happy. Even more complicated than typical depictions of Eastern cultures as regressive, Min’s grandmother is also caught between wanting to embrace her beloved grandson for all that he is and the disapproval of her husband (a marriage which was arranged by her parents).
This nuanced depiction of a queer friend group and chosen family is what drew the cast to the project, as was the opportunity to work alongside other iconic queer Asians. Kelly Marie Tran, who also credits the filming experience with helping her come out publicly as queer, says that she was “very excited to tell a queer story with a bunch of queer folks and to just be in that space.”
And the depiction of family members of queer Asian people was something that drew legends Joan Chen and Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung to the project. In Ahn’s film, the older generation, represented by Angela’s mom May (Chen) and Min’s grandmother (Youn), are accepting of their family’s queerness. May is even an overzealous ally who parties with drag queens and lion dancers to overcompensate for her past behaviour towards Angela, and Chen plays the role with a perfect balance of humour and heart. (Fun fact: Chen was cast in Lee’s original film as Wei-Wei, but the timing ultimately didn’t work out).
For Youn, she wasn’t sure she should take the part when she was first sent the script—but her son, who is gay, pushed her to take the role. “I supported him after he came out, but I thought maybe he might need some more support from me so I decided to do it,” she says. “When he first came out, as a very conservative Korean mother, I was very shocked. I asked, ‘Why him?’” Eventually, Youn learned more about homosexuality and came to accept her son. “I told him, no matter who you are, straight or gay, you are my son.”
Ultimately, The Wedding Banquet is a beautiful story about the messy work of coming together—as a family, as a community, as friends, as a culture, and above all, as your most authentic self. Ahn says that he wanted to show these characters reconciling with who they are in order to be with one another. “How do we balance our culture? How do we balance our family? How do we balance our sexuality so that they don’t conflict, but we find a way to bring all those elements together?”
For the foursome in The Wedding Banquet, it’s a messy but uplifting journey to become a family they not only are, but choose to be.
The Wedding Banquet is now playing in theatres.
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