“Queer theory takes the joy out of being gay!” blurts Bowen Yang’s character Chris in one of several laugh-out-loud yet emotional moments in “The Wedding Banquet,” Korean American filmmaker Andrew Ahn’s fourth feature in just nine years. It’s a “reimagining” rather than a remake of Ang Lee’s beloved 1993 Asian American rom-com classic of the same name.
Chris, who has put his PhD on hold, passes his days as a birder. When his amiable, handsome Korean MFA art student boyfriend Min (Han Gi-Chan) — in dire need of a green card to avoid being shuttled back to Korea and take rein of a chaebol managed by his astute grandmother played by Yuh-Jung Youn — proposes, Chris, though quite in love with Min, is petrified of committing. How can he, if he can’t commit to even a PhD? As his cousin (Bobo Le) sharply observes, Chris is merely interested in maintaining his “exquisitely ambivalent relationship to the best thing that has happened to [him].”
Speaking to IndieWire over Zoom, Ahn said that “eliciting an emotion” from everyday relationship dilemmas is what guides him. It helps that there’s a surplus of emotion and drama to mine from the source material. “What’s so beautiful about Ang Lee’s ‘The Wedding Banquet‘ is that incredible mixture of screwball comedy and heartfelt trauma. I knew I needed to do that, in my own way. I was excited to accentuate a certain chaos and messiness from my characters. They’re trying so hard, but they aren’t doing great for so much of the film.”
The other main characters not doing so well represent a fun innovation in this reworking of the original, which was a box office hit a third of a century ago. Here, Chris and Min live in the converted garage abutting the home of Chris’s best friend Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone), a lesbian couple caught up in a slew of expensive IVF treatments, the latest of which has failed. Min hatches a plan with Lee in a key plot move borrowed from the original: He and Angela will have a green-card marriage in exchange for the moneyed Min paying for their last IVF treatment. Chris and Angela are initially flabbergasted, but one of the funniest reactions is from Angela’s late-to-allyship Chinese mom, played by veteran Joan Chen (“Dìdi”): “My daughter, marrying a man!”
Speaking to the buoyant comedy, and specifically to the queer-theory-undercutting-gay-joy line, Ahn said, “There is a philosophy I am trying to articulate in the film. That [line] rhymes with one that Min says later to Angela: ‘You’re very smart, but sometimes you have to be stupid.’ Sometimes, overthinking can impede someone from following their heart and taking action. I think it’s really important that sometimes you get out of the way to be emotional.
“And that’s something in cinema that I’ve been kind of cultivating. I am a filmmaker that wears my heart on my sleeve, and I’m trying to find a way to tell very emotion-driven films, very sincere films, but with a level of sophistication so that people take it seriously. There’s some jadedness [in other directors] that I think can make some really interesting art, but that’s not the artist that I am. I’m really interested in being emotion forward, like John Cassavetes and other filmmakers who aren’t afraid to show their characters as disasters.”
That’s a surprising self-evaluation from a filmmaker whose movies — to say nothing of his TV directing on series including “Bridgerton” — differ from each other not just in their explorations of tones and plays with genre, but also in the consequent directness of their emotionality. Ahn rose to fame after winning the Spirit Awards John Cassavetes prize for his debut feature, “Spa Night,” a sexually frank coming-of-age drama of immense stealth. By contrast, Ahn’s critically acclaimed sophomore feature “Driveways” is a straight-up indie drama starring Hong Chau and the late Brian Dennehy. His 2022 hit “Fire Island,” a loose adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” is rambunctious, open-hearted, and unapologetically gay.
Perhaps a more accurate throughline across Ahn’s output is that his characters, knowingly or unknowingly, need their emotions to come forward. This despite Ahn’s filmmaking style defying easy categorization. “Spa Night” and “Fire Island” couldn’t be more different in how gay they are, just as “The Wedding Banquet” is a romantic comedy that lands with a different degree of earnestness and mischief than “Fire Island,” and is certainly much more than the comedy of errors the film’s insistent marketing materials would have you believe. As Ahn himself said, “Tone is probably the hardest thing to nail.”
Navigating multi-directional characterizations and balancing tone go hand-in-hand in “The Wedding Banquet,” which Ahn co-wrote with former Focus Features CEO James Schamus (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “Brokeback Mountain”), who had co-written the original with Lee and Neil Peng. Inspiring them in the structural arithmetic of multiple arcs was actually “Eat Drink Man Woman,” reveals Ahn, another early 1990s Ang Lee film with comparably complicated ensemble dynamics. The sense of community the green-card marriage trope engenders for the characters is “authentic to modern day queer life. Friendships or polyamory, we are such a web,” he said. “Our friendship with one person might affect how we are a lover to another.” He added, “This iteration of ‘The Wedding Banquet’ grew because of an initial thought experiment where I wondered, ‘What if the bride in Ang Lee’s film [Banquet] was also queer, and had a queer partner?’”
Starting work on the script as early as 2019, Schamus and Ahn began an organic, trial-and-error-driven writing process. They never worked on the same Final Draft file at the same time, exchanged passes, and used index cards, physical printouts, and table reads as writing tools. Ahn described Schamus as adept in story structure, since he has been a successful studio head, and when Ahn went off to make “Fire Island,” Schamus continued experimenting with the script.
In fact, Schamus is responsible for the character work informing a central turning point in the film, when Min’s grandmother makes a sudden visit from Korea to Seattle to meet Min’s new fiancée, and goes on to throw an elaborate traditional Paebaek wedding ceremony. Ahn said, “We had written a previous draft where Min’s grandmother doesn’t realize what’s happening [regarding the lavender marriage or Min’s sexuality] until much later. James said it maybe felt a little old-fashioned. He was like, ‘This woman’s smart. She knows.’ And that was so exciting for me, I said, ‘Yes, let’s do that!’”
In a talented ensemble of actors, Youn’s performance in a supporting role stands out for its piercing restraint. Ahn crafts scenes around her with great care, directing our gaze at what she sees, as she understands the foursome’s precarious Jenga of conflicts with brisk clarity. Here is where Ahn’s directorial philosophy to “filter the noise from real life, to focus attention on the under-appreciated” kicks into gear.
In discussing the blocking of the confrontation scene with his cinematographer Ki Jin Kim — also the DP on “Spa Nights” and “Driveways” — Ahn decided to let “Min’s grandmother hold court. So she’s the one on the sofa, and they’re on the stools, sitting lower. Much of the film is handheld, but much of her coverage is static. Just this subtle story-driven decision gives the moment and [Youn] a lot of gravitas. I really love her close-up in that scene. It’s actually very profile, and there’s something about her pleading that has so much dignity.”
Indeed, the scene grounds the film in lovely, unexpected ways, concretizing Ahn’s approach to film as a medium where the goal is to “find the spirit of the story you’re telling,” and to “embrace the spikiness” of humanity. Ahn, who is also quite prolific as a TV director, having overseen episodes of “Bridgerton,” “Gentefied,” and most recently, “Deli Boys,” says directing TV “feels like I’m doing director’s drag. I really inhabit a different persona to align with the instincts of the show.”
In a similar kind of self-control, he and Schamus had to be careful not to get carried away dotting all the I’s of the relationship arcs and supporting undercurrents in “The Wedding Banquet.” Asked if the film could be expanded into a TV show, he said, “There’s a construction [in the film] we had to take seriously, and then also an economy that is brutal and ruthless but also unfortunately a necessity for a modern-day attention span.”
When asked about the import of Han Gi-chan and whether Korean audiences, and Ahn himself, would think of “The Wedding Banquet” as a diaspora film, Ahn said, “What I might have benefited from in making this film is that there is a lot of interest in Korean culture, and not necessarily Korean American culture.” Laughing, he added, “We leaned into this kind of K-drama-style aesthetic. Just the fact that Min comes from a chaebol family, we leaned into it, knowing that it might be exciting for an audience. And I still got to keep that tension between Korean identity and queer identity. Had I made a different decision, I wonder if we would still be trying to make the film, actually, just from a business level.”
Addressing the film’s international release plans, Ahn said, “We do have plans to screen in Korea, which is very exciting, and of course, Youn Yuh-Jung is a big part of that. She’s the Meryl Streep of Korea and actually has an incredible gay following, so we joke that she’s the Barbra Streisand of Korea. But yes, I think I’m interested in all generations of the Korean diaspora and the Korean American experience. In another film, I may explore a different generation, a different perspective.”
“The Wedding Banquet” is now in theaters from Bleecker Street.
