The Wedding Banquet

In the first meditation on homosexuality in America, with Brokeback Mountain the more famous remembrance, Ang Lee directs his attention to the stigma of gayness in the Chinese culture. Contrasted with American inimical behavior where it is downright violent towards gays on the frontier, the Chinese are disappointed yet value sexuality in another aspect: purely as a function of procreation. 

Thus culturally, the difference shows the significance of the corporeal body. Clearly the incubation of Christianity reveals sin as something worth purging. To the Chinese, so long as a child can be birthed, the dysfunction of gayness is manageable.

Here too, the difference in the insistence of patrilineal inheritance. Marriage serves this ultimate purpose to the Chinese. In Brokeback Mountain, we do not have a clear sense of the urgency of procreation to continue the surname of the father. Thus in the latter film, the immorality of homosexuality ends in tragedy ironically because heterosexuality does not convey any meaning outside of maintaining the homogeneity of a society, preserving it from uncertainty (i.e. decay).

In regards to portraying the fusion of gay and Chinese culture in early 90's New York, Mr. Lee does not hit the mark. There is too much concentration on the Chinese family which distracts from the gay life which Wei Tsung and Simon attempt to hide. As is telling, at least 60% of the film is in Chinese.

The lack of blending of the two minority statuses in America is a disappointment. We do not get a sense of the struggle to be a gay Chinese despite the apparent comfort the character has in his skin - only in the city itself, mind you, as he does not have the same comfort level to approach his parents. The center of the narrative is in his fear of failing his family. As if the gay community is devoid of those who have shared similar fates that he cannot rely upon for advice? Is he truly the only gay Chinese person at his wedding? 

The banquet itself is worth seeing to absorb a disturbingly unknown culture in America (disturbing because we do not see enough Chinese culture despite being ancient and innumerable). But Chinese cultural production in the film was atrociously done. In fact, the story itself barely hangs on a thread: it is too vain in its efforts to be a diagram of cultural crossroads found in America. Mr. Lee would have been better served filming a documentary titled "Homo and Hun".

Grade: D+