The Wedding Banquet
(Xi yan)

Beneath the elegance of a social comedy, The Wedding Banquet is a remarkably nuanced reflection on the tension between identity, desire, and legacy. Ang Lee stages an unassuming theater where the weight of conventions is measured through smiles and silences. A gay man’s arranged marriage becomes the paradoxical scene of an impossible truth — that of a love forced to disguise itself in order to exist. Behind the humor, the filmmaker observes the diplomacy of bodies, the exhaustion of living a double life, the effort to reconcile filial loyalty with intimacy. It is not mere social satire, but an elegy to the fragile architecture of compromise — where emotion arises precisely from the conflict between sincerity and imposed role. Jérôme Baron