The Wedding Banquet + Two to One

Queer angst and implied polyamory

The Wedding Banquet

I watched the original The Wedding Banquet (1993) from director Ang Lee after watching this new update. Aside from both plots revolving around a sham heterosexual wedding to get homophobic relatives off respective gay men’s backs, they’re quite different films. Tonally the 1993 version is all 90’s drama and is really about a family’s inability to communicate and be honest with each other and how this affects the relationships they have with others. The 2025 version meanwhile at times wants to be a broad comedy and also wants to take itself very seriously, and gets uncomfortably stuck between the two.

Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone) live in a lovely large old house in Seattle inherited from Lee’s family (which already decreased the relatability factor for me by some degree) and are trying for a baby via IVF. Angela’s best friend Chris (Bowen Yang) and his boyfriend Min (Han Gi-chan) are living in the shed in their backgarden. Having been together several years, Min proposes to Chris. But Chris refuses, saying he needs time to “figure stuff out”, plus he doesn’t want to be responsible for ruining Min’s life by cutting him off from his wealthy Korean family who don’t know that he’s gay. Except Min’s grandmother Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung) wants him to go back home and work in the family business, so he has to marry someone to stay in America. When Lee’s second IVF round fails, and they can’t afford anymore, Min comes up with a deal. He’ll marry Angela and in return pay for their IVF. But of course with the varied ways these characters struggle to communicate, it’s not that simple.

It takes a bit of time for this exhaustingly convoluted plot to be set up, unfortunately mainly by using a lot of unnatural sounding expository dialogue. The film also drops us very quickly in a lot of angst and drama from these characters with very little build up. It’s like being trauma dumped on by someone you’ve just met (or at least how I imagine it feels as it’s usually me doing the trauma dumping). At first Min is the only fun character to be around because he elicits the biggest laughs.

The film settles into itself by the second half, mostly as Youn Yuh-jung provides much needed gravitas and subtly to the proceedings when Min’s grandmother makes a surprise visit. Joan Chen as Angela’s mum whose made being a supportive ally her whole personality is also good value. And while the plot twists can be seen from a mile away, as we get to know these characters better it’s easier to get invested and even be touched by what unfolds.

The Wedding Banquet is not the delight I was hoping it to be, but it’s a film with a lot of heart and care in bringing queer stories to the big screen.

I give it three DVD copies of Certain Women out of five.

Two to One

I love a movie that leaves you wanting to head straight to Wikipedia afterwards to read about the real events it’s based on. Two to One is one of those films, only less because I found the movie fascinating and more because it puts aside exploring its historical setting in favour of depicting one woman’s effort to convince her husband and her baby daddy to be in a polyamorous relationship.

It’s East Germany in the summer of 1990. Germany is on the brink of reunification and one of the consequences is that all East Germans have a deadline to swap their ostmarks for West German deutschemarks. When Maren (Sandra Hüller), husband Robert (Max Riemelt) and their recently returned old friend Volker (Ronald Zehrfeld) are shown by Markowski (Peter Kurth), an older relative of Robert’s, where they can find literally billions of dumped soon to be useless ostmark paper money, the three realise they can use the last few days before the deadline to make the new capitalism system work in their favour.

While the characters are fictional, this is based on a real event. And it’s an intriguing set up that, when it’s finally in motion after introducing the aforementioned love triangle, leads to some fun heist style antics, especially when the trio decide that buying and selling appliances is the best way to make their fortune and they get their whole apartment building involved. There’s also occasionally moments that touch on the deeply emotional experience for some of the characters of living in a communist state for 40 years and in some cases really believing in the ideals of the system, then suddenly being forced to join the society that they had been told was the antithesis of those ideals. But these fascinating aspects are few and far between when the film is far more interested in a bizarre subplot around whether Maren and Robert’s daughter is actually Volker’s child.

Perhaps if watched with more context of the events, as obviously local German audiences would have had, Two to One could make for entertaining viewing. But it feels like a missed opportunity to thoroughly explore a real life story that seems interesting enough on its own without all the extras and flourishes.

I give it two and half microwaves out of five.

Two to One is playing as part of the German Film Festival.

(I also recently reviewed The Salt Path starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs on the latest episode of Movie Squad on RTRFM.)