A Film Canon

It's rare to encounter a culture clash comedy that's as delicate or as poised as The Wedding Banquet. Most of the time, narratives of this kind reiterate the audience's identification with one particular culture, by way of an exotic excursion into a second - and, on paper, this might seem to be Ang Lee's project. When Taiwanese immigrant Wai-Tung Gao's (Winston Chao) parents descend on New York to ensure that his sham marriage with tenant Wei-Wei (May Chin) takes place in the traditional manner, a series of comic possibilities ensue for him and long-term boyfriend Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein). That Lee largely refrains from comedy in favour of a milder, gentler bittersweetness is testament to his effort to calibrate American and Taiwanese culture in a way that finally gestures towards something that remains unspoken, or unspeakble in both; or, more specifically, to problematise the apparently simple distinction between being closeted in Taiwan, and 'out' in Manhattan. Not only does this implode the conventional outing narrative of a permissive mother and prohibitive father, but it transforms 'outing' itself into a kind of suppression, or at least only understands it as being about saying something insofar as it gestures towards everything that can't, shouldn't or needn't be explained about sexual orientation. The result is an exquisite disorientation, encapsulated in the slyness with which Lee reverses the cinema-goer's residual anglocentrism, presenting an uncanny vision of Manhattan in which everyone effortlessly speaks Chinese. It's a genuine call for cultural syncretism as something that can be expected to be experimental, tentative and even uncomfortable - the best kind of rainbow alliance, or Chinatown - culminating with a becoming-family that feels quite jettisoned from recent, streamlined formulations of queer nuclear family values.