Ang Li’s Father trilogy, Pushing Hands, Wedding Banquet and Eat, Drink, Man and Woman are among my favorite movies all the movies around the world. Ang Li is a very special directly. With his Chinese grown and western education background, he has broader horizon than other Chinese director. Although he started with a movie discussing the cultural differences in the Pushing Hands, he soon terminate such a exploration. From his second movie, Wedding Banquet, he started to explore the more common topics among all human beings, homo-sexual relationship v.s. conservative society/paternity.
The Wedding Banquet is actually my favorite movie among the Father trilogy. Comparing to the other two, it is more structurally rigorous and effortless in discussing complicated topics. Weitong, a Chinese immigrant and son of veteran KMT division commander, lives with his gay partner in Manhattan. Under the pressure from his parents for marriage, he agree with his partner Simon’s plan to marry a Chinese illegal immigrant, Gu Weiwei, which can give Weiwei a green card at the same time. Weitong’s parents decided to fly to United States to meet up with their daughter-in-law and prepared a wedding banquet for Weitong. Well, I am not going to be the spoiler to release the whole story. After all the dramas, Weitong’s parents figured out the truth. But to maintain the conservative decent of the family, all of them decide to play the I-know-you-know-and-you-know-I-know-but-we-are-not-going-to-release game and no one put the cards on the table. Wei-tong pretended to be a happy newly married man and his parents satisfied parents for the son’s marriage, just like the happy wedding album at the end of the movie.
I will still list this movie as a Chinese movie rather than a movie that I can share with every friends. Although the movie follows a strict plotting structure that student can learned from western movie schools (you can clearly tell how the conflict is ignited, pushed forward and breaks out and is solved), most of the jokes can’t be understood unless you grew up from a Chinese ethnic background. The movie is made a bit academism (Very green hand. Like a student’s splendid homework to teacher). But Ang Lee’s talent and deep thought is not attained.
Ang Lee is actually one of my favorite Chinese director in China (The other one is Jiang Wen. I don’t care about over praised Zhang Yimou or Chen Kaige at all). Ang Lee is special because he is trying out different topics of the movie (but the core theme of all his movies are representing the common barriers and conflicts all the human beings are facing) rather than staying only in his comfort zone. He can be very diversified.
