Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.In 1993, Taiwanese director Ang Lee released The Wedding Banquet, a romcom about a gay Manhattan couple, socially conservative parents and a Chinese woman seeking a green card. In the course of that gently screwball tale, a baby was born. The child would now be a peer to the millennial characters in the remake of Lee’s spry charmer. The new film is a do-over rather than a sequel, but you might still picture that 1993 baby turning up here as an adult in a story where change and the past can’t help but coexist. The set-up again demands a certain focus, not least now that the plot hinges on two couples. The first are Chinese-American Chris and Korean Min, an artist with a family fortune in trust. (They are played by Bowen Yang and Han-Gi Chan.) The urgent demand for a sham marriage is reprised, but the female half of the deal now comes from a second gay couple, Chris and Min’s friends Angela and Lee, played by Kelly Marie Tran and Lily Gladstone (Oscar-nominated for Killers of the Flower Moon). Their crisis is an ongoing attempt at IVF. So, then. In one suburban Seattle home, a pair of women with hefty medical bills. And living literally next door, a wealthy heir in need of a bride. If you can see the next step, you have correctly identified only the first what-could-go-wrong idea in a movie filled with them.Director Andrew Ahn makes the story his own, but also hints at three decades of changing social attitudes for those who remember the original film (or indeed the 1990s). Other balancing acts are less assured. Melancholy farce is a tough brief, and despite the cast having funny bones, the movie can’t quite commit to either japey comedy or the deeper, starker story the film could be. Instead, we settle somewhere in the middle, in a squidgy group hug.And yet with all manner of tangents spun off the premise, it takes skill from Ahn just to keep the thing from collapsing. Still more to make sure all four central characters feel like equal partners in the human drama — a trick that, like a successful relationship, speaks to love for the project, and sheer hard work. ★★★☆☆In UK cinemas from May 9 and in US cinemas now
