Bowen Yang and Lily Gladstone help plan a sham wedding in the first trailer for “The Wedding Banquet,” a modern retelling of Ang Lee’s 1993 queer comedy of errors.
Set in Seattle, “The Wedding Banquet” follows Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and her girlfriend, Lee (Gladstone), who are trying to have a baby through IVF but can’t afford to pay for another round of fertility treatment. Meanwhile their friend Min (Han Gi-chan), a closeted scion of a multinational empire, has a student visa that’s about to expire. When his boyfriend Chris (Yang) rejects his marriage proposal for various reasons, he pops the question to Angela instead. From there, a wedding plot is hatched: a green card marriage in exchange for funding Lee’s IVF. But their plans to quietly elope are upended when Min’s grandmother (“Minari” Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung) flies in from Korea to meet her future granddaughter-in-law and insists on throwing them an all-out wedding extravaganza. Naturally, plenty of hijinks ensue.
“We need to de-queer the house,” Yang’s character shouts as his boyfriend drives back from the airport with his grandma. “God, you have so much lesbian literature.” Later in the trailer, Tran’s Angela spots a stray, betraying piece of art in the bathroom. As she takes the frame off the wall, she laments: “Everything in this house is gay!”
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“Fire Island” filmmaker Andrew Ahn directed the remake, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival on Monday. James Schamus, who co-wrote the original with Lee and Neil Peng, also penned this updated take with Ahn. The director admits he didn’t necessarily feel a “Wedding Banquet” remake was necessary, though he eventually found value in the idea.
“Times have changed since 1993 for queer people,” Ahn told Variety prior to the film’s Sundance premiere. “There was a new version of the story we could tell. We can get married. Now that we can get married, should we? Do we want to? As a millennial, there’s this burden of choice. It shifts the generational focus, and it’s looking toward the future.”
Watch the first teaser below: