Review of The Wedding Banquet

This movie is a humorous clash between cultures that exposes truths and untruths in stereotypes, sexuality, and tradition. Culture plays into unsaid motivation for each character's actions and decisions throughout the movie. Fortunately, the humor never stops and the movie does not turn dismal or depressing. The protagonist, Wai Tung, acts as the essence of the struggle between the expectations of conservative tradition and the self-honesty that his homosexuality and bi-cultural thinking demand. For example, Wai-Tung's workout scenes represent his release of frustration, while his initial "tough love" for Wei Wei seems to source from their similar cultural background. Overall, Wai Tung struggles with his desire to fulfill his parent's wishes (i.e. the expectations of his culture) of a heterosexual marriage and 'normal' life. Through lying to others, and lying to himself, he becomes spiteful and distanced from loved ones like his parents and lover Simon. He is the last to come to terms with himself, although he is a tragic character, he is a genuinely exasperated character due to the extent of his conflicts in love and life-decision. As for Wei Wei, she finds herself stuck preparing for a hollow marriage. When she is accepted like a daughter from Wai Tung's mother, she becomes motivated by cultural expectation to maintain the ruse, especially through the wedding banquet scene, to do refrain from disappointing Wai Tung's mother. The most cultural motivation resides in Wai Tung's parents. Their culture has been slowly instilled in them and often seemed to fill the stereotype of blindly traditional Asian parents. The mother is the first to disprove this stereotype, with the father following at the end of the movie. The wedding banquet took place because of their motivation from their culture and the love they share for Wai Tung and his new 'bride'. The movie ends with an understanding, where Wai Tung's father undoes the assumption of his ignorance to Wai Tung's homosexuality, and Wei Wei keeps the baby with Simon and Wai Tung as fathers. By the end, the characters had churned through this story, touched and felt the angles of each other's feelings, true and unnecessary expectations, and found each other as humans rather than a collection of fears and misunderstanding. The ending is that of weathered unity, one which is not Utopian, but honest, adaptive, and hopeful.