The Wedding Banquet (Ang Lee, 1993).
Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (1993) begins at a gym in New York, where Wai-Tung Gao (Winston Chao) labors over a leg press and a loaded barbell, listening to a recorded message from his mother in Taiwan. She’s sent a cassette in lieu of a letter, she explains, because menopause-related pain prevents her from holding a pen; meanwhile, his father has just retired and is struggling in a different way as he transitions to life at home. “Maybe it’s because I’m getting old, and he’s getting older,” she continues, “and you’re not getting any younger yourself. When will you marry?” Wai-Tung, who isn’t yet out to his parents, returns home to his boyfriend, Simon (Mitchell Litchtenstein), and relays the rest of his mother’s message with chagrin: She’s enrolled him in a singles club which will set him up—with women.
“Why don’t you just tell them?” asks Simon, though he knows that honesty is out of the question. He suggests, instead, that Wai-Tung marry Wei-Wei (May Chin), an artist and part-time waitress from China effectively squatting in one of his investment properties: She needs a green card, and Wai-Tung needs a wife. Though he is initially resistant, Wai-Tung ultimately warms up to the idea of a spousal tax break, and agrees to a quick courthouse marriage. As soon as they hear the news, however, Wai-Tung’s parents fly over, escalating the charade. In the course of playing house with their “roommate and landlord” Simon—who frantically redecorates with hanging scrolls and prepares Chinese meals to establish Wei-Wei as the consummate housewife—Wai-Tung and Wei-Wei’s marriage leads to an elaborate Chinese wedding banquet and, soon after, to her accidentally getting pregnant.
Thirty-two years later, Andrew Ahn’s reimagined The Wedding Banquet (2025) begins by emphasizing what has changed in the intervening decades. In its opening scene, tradition isn’t just sloughed, but shimmied off: From under the cloak of a Chinese lion dance, the drag queen Miss Shu Mai bursts forth to inaugurate the Seattle LGBTQIA+ Equality Gala, where Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and her partner Lee (Lily Gladstone) are gathered to celebrate her mother, May (a transcendent Joan Chen), as she accepts an “Ally of the Year” award for her work with the local PFLAG chapter. As is her habit amongst friends, fellow PFLAG members, and Instagram followers alike, May takes the opportunity to share Angela’s coming-out story, her bejeweled qipao shimmering in the spotlight. Adding to Angela’s dismay, she later announces that Lee is undergoing in vitro fertilization. “The donor is Taiwanese, he went to Yale,” she enthuses. “He’s a cardiologist! And his sperm was very expensive!”
Though Angela is out to her mom, May’s habit of broadcasting the intimate details of their relationship—interpreted by Angela as performative, and a poor substitute for genuine support—supplies Angela with a steady stream of unexpressed rage. Despite its contemporary updates, then, Ahn’s version maintains the core familial tensions of Lee’s original farce. As with Wai-Tung and his parents, Angela’s relationship with her mother is strained by all that she wants but can’t bring herself to say, and her resulting taciturn posture puts a damper on her other major relationships. After Lee’s IVF fails, she and Angela argue in the car about what they should do next: Reluctant to take out another mortgage, Lee suggests they could save up so that Angela, who is younger, can carry the baby instead. “I’m not your mother,” Lee pleads, encouraging Angela to voice her discontent instead of shutting down. “Don’t just simmer!” Their argument gets derailed by another between their housemates: Angela’s best friend from college, Chris (Bowen Yang), has refused his boyfriend Min’s (Han Gi-Chan) hand in marriage, protesting the proposal was only for a green card; upon the expiration of his student visa, Min is due to return to Korea, where he is expected to take over the family’s multinational business.
The Wedding Banquet (Andrew Ahn, 2025).
As in Lee’s version, the avoidant behavior of Ahn’s protagonists propels the plot, its mounting absurdity a reflection of how far they’ll go to avoid confrontation. Angela and Chris, bonded by a common struggle to express themselves, repeatedly stay out drinking together to avoid what awaits them at home; on one such occasion, they return to discover that their partners have devised a plan whereby Min will fund Lee’s IVF in exchange for a marriage of convenience to Angela, allowing him to stay in the US; on another, they wake up next to each other in postcoital horror after a drunken night that results in Angela becoming pregnant. As chaos ping-pongs around this dynamic quad, Ahn transposes the original film’s dramedy of errors into a playful screwball ensemble piece—in the press kit, James Schamus, producer and cowriter on both films, places it in dialogue with “comedies of remarriage” like The Lady Eve (1941) and The Philadelphia Story (1940).
The term “screwball” comes from baseball, a reference to a pitch that breaks in an unexpected direction. But as the scholar Grégoire Halbout points out in Hollywood Screwball Comedy 1934–1945 (2022), the genre also evolved from another foundational American pastime, the pursuit of happiness. Screwball’s emergence in the 1930s coincided with a time of socioeconomic upheaval, “marked by a loss of confidence in the elites and in the system,” when many Americans were renegotiating that very pursuit. “If prosperity, now in peril, was the guarantor of the individual’s well-being, those hopes were slim,” Halbout writes, “and the solution might be found through withdrawal into the private space of the conjugal unit, rather than in the illusion of collective action.”1 The terms of that traditional “conjugal unit,” were overdue for revision, too: more women were entering the workforce, having extramarital sex, and using contraception.
Cinema’s capacity to engage with these conditions was mediated by the Hays Code, which the Motion Picture Association began enforcing in 1934. As a result, dialogue developed in ways both practical and philosophical: Characters expressed their desires—by means of thinly veiled innuendo and physical comedy—and, in the process, literally rearticulated new marital norms, all while avoiding censorship. This in turn generated genre frameworks like the “comedy of remarriage,” first described by Stanley Cavell in his seminal Pursuits of Happiness (1981) as a “struggle for mutual freedom” between the sexes. According to this logic, modern love was no longer determined by the alignment of stars or social conditions, but rather by the ability of those involved to effectively communicate, to “work it out” by “talking it out” (even, or especially, if they had previously separated); harebrained hijinks, like sham weddings and accidental pregnancies, ensued when they tried to circumvent this necessary communion. Screwball, then, was undergirded by a philosophy both progressive and recursive, one that democratized love while also reinforcing marriage as its ultimate aspiration. In the process it affirmed a deeply American model of marriage: as a labor of love, or work.
Top: Green Card (Peter Weir, 1990). Bottom: The Proposal (Anne Fletcher, 2009).
That notion is reflected in the assumption that a green-card marriage is a “marriage of convenience,” with the implication that some benefit has been uncoupled from the requisite upkeep. Such is the case in Peter Weir’s Green Card (1990) when Brontë (Andie MacDowell), a horticulturalist in Manhattan, marries a stranger (Gérard Depardieu)—a recent migrant from France with a soon-to-expire visa —to secure her dream apartment: The co-op board requires it to be occupied by a married couple, seeing as its sprawling greenhouse, with which Brontë is enamored, was neglected by its former, pointedly single, tenant. While the city outside its walls continues to diversify, the building is secured by an elderly, all-white board—they hand over the keys to Brontë only after clarifying that her husband is “away in Africa,” but not ethnically African—as well as a doorman who, observing that Brontë’s mail remains addressed to her maiden name, queries if it’s “that women’s lib stuff.” “Call me old fashioned if you want,” he later offers, “but that’s what’s wrong with this country, you know. The family is going down the toilet.”
The spouses happily pursue their separate lives: Georges resides and waits tables downtown, at a multicultural restaurant named All Nations, while Brontë breezes through her wifely cosplay, removing her wedding ring while volunteering at a community garden on the Lower East Side, and replacing it when she retires for the night to her greenhouse uptown. But the scrutiny of two federal agents forces Georges back into her life and onto her floral Queen Anne sofa, where they perform a romantic affection that eventually becomes real. When he is deported after failing his immigration interview, Brontë slides on their wedding rings as a testament to their feelings for each other. Complicating that sense of tragedy, however, is the broader context of their romance, which recasts Brontë as having bought into a system by which she benefits from—though she is heartbroken by—their separation. Whether enforced by a co-op board or the federal government, the institutions of marriage and the nuclear family, along with citizenship and private property, together dictate whose lives are productive, and thus valuable to the state, which in turn determines who has the right to live and stay—the right to a home. As a homeowner, spouse, and US citizen, Brontë is advantaged at the expense of someone like Georges, a foreigner with no assets. Though she feels the injustice of this system upon his deportation, it also sets the conditions which make her private greenhouse—and her privilege—possible.
In that vein, the “comedy of green-card marriage” exposes (if in some cases unwittingly) the fundamental conservatism of institutional marriage. The pursuit of a green card works in tandem with matrimonial procedures to enforce traditional power relations. In The Proposal (2009), for example, a Canadian editor at a publishing house in Manhattan, Margaret (Sandra Bullock), coerces her assistant, Andrew (Ryan Reynolds), into marriage when her work visa is denied. Sensing opportunity, he secures the promise of promotion in return. To seal their deal, he forces her to her knees on a busy sidewalk in a mock proposal, relishing her squirming in a pencil skirt. With a federal agent watching their case closely, they fly to Andrew’s family home in Alaska to celebrate their engagement. There, Margaret struggles—to haul her luggage across a pebbled street, to board a boat, to stomach the seafood—and Andrew refuses to help her, insisting to his family that she wants to do everything herself. “She’s one of those,” he explains with some difficulty. “She’s a feminist.” Meanwhile, in an attempt to make Margaret feel at home, Andrew’s mother presents the couple with a platter of freshly baked cinnamon rolls for breakfast, though they had insisted she spare the effort. “You’re family now,” she tells Margaret. “It’s no trouble”—cheerfully minimizing her domestic labor as an act of love. Later, Margaret, mocking the traditional image of femininity, hands Andrew a roll while joking about being his “little missus”—only to register that, having improbably developed feelings for him, the sentiment may be more earnest than she had realized.
Green Card: An American Romance (Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, 1982).
There’s a similar line in Anora (2024), in which the 21-year-old son of a Russian oligarch, Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), meets the self-assured stripper Ani (Mikey Madison) at a gentlemen’s club in Manhattan and pays her to temporarily be his girlfriend. Their week of sex, drugs, and video games culminates in a trip on his family’s jet to Vegas, where Vanya proposes to Ani so that he can stay in the country. “You want me to be your little wifey?” she responds, sarcasm softening into something like genuine hope and desire. The two rush hand-in-hand to the Little White Chapel, then take to the strip where, under the relentless twinkle of lights and LED fireworks, Ani screams, “You’re an American, Vanya! We’re fucking married!” Their marital bliss is fleeting: Back in New York, Vanya flees when his parents send their henchmen to force an annulment, leaving Ani in their clutches.
By ultimately forcing its titular Cinderella back to her apartment beneath the elevated tracks in Brighton Beach, Anora remains clear-eyed about the cost, even for women as smart as Ani, of buying into the rags-to-riches fairy tale: Ani’s precarity as a poor sex worker is amplified, rather than protected, by her status as Vanya’s wife. And while Margaret is financially secure in comparison, The Proposal similarly demonstrates how marriage doesn’t fortify, but erodes the power of a professional woman. After coming clean about their arrangement to Andrew’s family, Margaret heads back to her New York office to await deportation. But Andrew, having realized his feelings for her, proposes marriage—for real, this time. “Aren’t you supposed to get down on your knee or something?” Margaret jokes, though his feet stay firmly planted. “Show her who’s boss, Andrew!” shouts one of their male coworkers as they kiss, bringing the fairy tale full-circle with Andrew’s workplace revenge fantasy by allowing him to finally dominate Margaret as her husband. Inadvertently, then, The Proposal affirms Anora’s sense of cruelty, by subjecting Margaret to the same trajectory as Ani—though of course her descent is less dramatic—as a requisite part of her happy ending.
If not Ani, nor Margaret, then who might successfully pursue the American Dream? In Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s Green Card: An American Romance (1982), Sumie (Sumie Nobuhara), a Japanese artist studying in Los Angeles, believes that she has saved herself from a traditional domestic life in her hometown by proposing marriage to her part-time lover, Jay (Jay Struthers), a Southern Californian surfer. “I want to stay here,” she pleads, “I love America!” To which Jay suggests, “Maybe, in a way, you’re marrying America.” They are fittingly married on the Fourth of July, but soon after, having stretched every marital archetype past its most optimistic, American limit, Sumi spends her days alone in the kitchen, cooking and waiting for Jay to come home, her career and friends neglected in the course of playing a role she believed she was liberated from—a melodramatic caricature of a mid-century housewife. As with Anora and The Proposal, the “American romance” depicted in Green Card is not between its leading characters, but with the American Dream. If that mythology supposes that happiness is attainable to anyone who works hard enough, it also holds that the nature of that work for women is to perform the part of “missus” or “wifey.”
Past Lives (Celine Song, 2023).
At a certain point in all relationships, but especially in heterosexual marriage, the line between romance and remuneration becomes indeterminate. That ambiguity comes to light in Celine Song’s Past Lives (2023), when Nora (Greta Lee) and Arthur (John Magaro), a married couple in New York, are visited by Nora’s old schoolyard crush Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), whom she knew as a child in her native Seoul. The two fell out of touch when Nora’s family emigrated, but have reconnected over a decade later, as adults, through Facebook. Nora and Arthur met at an artists’ residency when they both happened to be single and living in New York; they moved in together to save on rent, and got married so Nora could get a green card. It’s a lackluster story, Arthur feels, reflecting on the way Hae Sung and Nora have worked—despite the years, the distance, and the difference in time zones—to remain connected. “What if you met someone else at that residency,” he asks, “another writer from New York, who’d also read all the same books you had … who could give you useful notes on your plays … wouldn’t you be lying here with him?” Though he doesn’t phrase it this way, Arthur seems to wonder: is theirs a marriage of convenience?
Past Lives begins with a mundane question that by its end takes on Arthur’s troubled register. “Who do you think they are to each other?” whisper offscreen onlookers as the frame narrows around Nora, Hae Sung, and Arthur at a bar: Are they siblings, spouses, friends? As Arthur later senses, who anyone is to anyone else is eternally in flux, and further complicated by living in a society that subjects our relationships to the pressures of the market. To attain Nora’s green card, their marriage would have been judged bona fide based on their ability to provide specific evidence: not knowledge of their skin care routines or tattoos—as in Green Card and The Proposal, respectively—but records of shared real-estate leases, bank accounts, and insurance policies. (The journalist Natasha Lennard has put it this way: “Love, according to the state, is an asset merger.”2) Though Past Lives doesn’t depict this process, its logic is reflected in Arthur’s anxiety: When governed by an infrastructure designed to manipulate, rather than support, social relations, the most intimate details of our lives are increasingly arbitrated—often without our knowledge—from the outside in.
Top: The Wedding Banquet (Andrew Ahn, 2025). Bottom: The Wedding Banquet (Ang Lee, 1993).
In an endearing nod to the original The Wedding Banquet, Ahn restages the scene in which Simon frantically redecorates for the arrival of Wai-Tung’s parents. Chris, having learned that Min’s halmoni (Youn Yuh-jung) has arrived in Seattle to meet his fiancée, assembles Angela and Lily to “de-queer” their house: everything from memoirs by Elliot Page and Tegan and Sara to rainbow fridge magnets, a Lilith Fair poster, and a DVD collection that includes Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women (2016, in which Lily Gladstone’s character harbors a crush on Kristen Stewart’s). “Everything in this house is gay!” Chris despairs, as he heaps the offending articles into their shed. The absurdity playfully illustrates how the pursuit of heterosexual ideals can shape and deform everyday life. Min’s return only puts a finer point on this. “Honey, I’m home!” he calls out, swinging open the front door in an impersonation of a sitcom husband.
The other, more cynical joke in this scene concerns its hasty cosmetic changes: No matter the changes to the decor, the home’s bricks and mortar remain. By updating The Wedding Banquet to reflect how queer life has changed since the ’90s, Ahn demonstrates how much of that progress is linked to repressive heteropatriarchal norms—an aspirational assimilation that may be a means of survival. Wai-Tung’s parents come to accept his relationship with Simon, perhaps recognizing that their life together does not, at least in several material ways, deviate from the life he would have made with Wei-Wei. It was Simon, after all, who cooked all their meals and who takes up traditionally feminine responsibilities, all while patiently nursing his father back to health after a stroke. And by agreeing to be a coparent to Wei-Wei’s child, Simon is continuing the Gao family line. Similarly, Min’s halmoni comes to accept his sexuality in the course of admiring the patchwork textiles he created in school, sweeping tapestries that unify mismatched scraps of fabric. “You bring these small individual pieces together to create something so meaningful and beautiful,” she reflects. “You created your own family. Just like your art.”
The gravity of Youn Yuh-jung’s delivery grounds the hackneyed metaphor with a sense of pathos. It also makes you wonder what her reaction might have been had Min’s art represented an experience that was less traditional—and less profitable—than the nuclear, property-owning family. In the end, the couples are successfully “remarried,” having worked through their various spats to reestablish domestic equilibrium, this time with two babies in the equation: One stirs in the middle of the night, then the other, sending each of their four caretakers to the nursery in turn. “Big drama on the baby monitor,” Chris quips sleepily, before they all join for a group hug—in many ways an untraditional, and joyful, scene that ends on a shot of the suburban bungalow’s exterior, encircled by a white picket fence.
- Grégoire Halbout, Hollywood Screwball Comedy, 1934–1945: Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals, trans. Aliza Krefetz (Bloomsbury, 2022), 3. ↩
- Natasha Lennard, “Love According to the State” in Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life (Verso, 2019). ↩