The Wedding Banquet

Ang Lee's brilliant career began with a tiny, overlooked movie called "Pushing Hands," but it broke out -- with gay audiences, anyway -- with 1993's "The Wedding Banquet," a warm-hearted charmer about a same-sex couple, pushy parents, and a wedding that was supposed to satisfy everybody... but didn't.

Taiwanese star Winston Chao plays Wai-Tung, a Chinese businessman living and working in the United States. Wad-Tung's boyfriend is Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein), a good-natured physical therapist who suggests that Wai-Tung can satisfy his relentless parents by agreeing to marry one of his tenants, Weo-Wei (May Chin), who will otherwise have to leave the country.

It seems like a good plan -- after all, Wai-Tung's parents are impossible to put off, and when he sends them an impossible list of demands for what he wants in a bride (a Ph.D. in physics and an opera singer) they somehow manage to check every box and set him up with a match who is both beautiful and brainy -- too brainy to be deceived about the fact that Wai-Tung is gay.

But things go awry when Mr. and Mrs, Gao (played by Lee's "Pushing Hands" star Sihung Lung and Ya-Lei Kuei) make the journey to the States themselves, in order to be a the wedding in person. Things go even more sideways when the Gaos -- disappointed by the city hall ceremony there son opts to have -- arrange for a lavish celebration after the fact. From there, things only get stickier.

Olive Films presents this classic of GLBT cinema in a lovely Blu-ray edition. There's one extra (not counting the trailer), and that's a standard-def feature titled "A Forbidden Passion," in which Lee and his producing partner James Schamus talk about how Lee found his way to Schamus in the first place, and dish on the hows and whys of this movie's making.

All around, in every way, "The Wedding Banquet" is a delight, and this Blu-ray is a welcome edition.

"The Wedding Banquet"
Blu-ray
$15.95
https://olivefilms.com/product/the-wedding-banquet