ASIA: CHINA & TAIWAN: FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE, THE JOY LUCK CLUB, THE WEDDING BANQUET
well - Tom in particular shows someone beaten down by life. And only a true crank wouldn't be moved by the story of Suyuan and her lost daughters, or at the final scene (friends at the time who are hard-core action fans admitted weeping at the end). THE JOY LUCK CLUB may be obvious, but it works.
While the previous films were soap operas, Lee's THE WEDDING BANQUET is a farce, or it seems like it will be at first. But while the expected comedy is shown, there's also a surprising strain of seriousness that balances the comedy, and makes the film deeper than you might predict.
Set in San Francisco, it's the story of Wai Tung (Winston Chao), a landlord living in Manhattan. He's gay, and currently happily involved with Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein). The only problem is his parents (Sihung Lung and Ah-Leh Gua) keep pressuring him to get married, and he doesn't have the heart to tell them he's gay. To appease them, he goes out with an opera singer, who has a similar struggle - she can't tell her parents she has an American boyfriend. Meanwhile, Wei Wei (Maya Chin) is an artist living in one of Wai's apartments, but is struggling to make ends meet. If she doesn't get work soon, she'll get deported. Wai likes her fine, while Wei secretly has a crush on him, but it's Simon who expedites things. He proposes the two get married, so Wai can get his parents off his back, and Wei will be able to stay in the country (plus, Simon reminds the business-minded Wai of the tax breaks he gets being married). Except that Wei's parents come to Manhattan to throw the couple a wedding banquet.
As expected, the highlight of the movie is the banquet itself, which is a long affair that makes American weddings seem frugal. But something unexpected happens after the wedding, changing everything. And it's plot twists that make you realize Lee and co-writers Neil Peng and James Schamus are up to more than simple farce. Each character is treated seriously, and not just as a politically correct character. Wai's father, for example, though he knows little English (Simon has a passing understanding of Chinese, but he's not fluent), turns out to understand things more than you would guess. And Wei is also more complicated than she appears, as is Simon, who recognizes almost too late how he's
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