The Wedding Banquet is what happens when The Philadelphia Story comes out of the closet: "This represents 5000 years of sexual repression," is the Jimmy Stewart-like comment of a wedding guest (director Ang Lee in a cameo) at the lavishly kitsch nuptials of Wai Tung (Winston Chao) and Wei Wei (May Chin). The groom is not only gay but spoken for; the bride, a starving artist who needs a Green Card. The marriage will please the authority figures-his parents, the INS-but things are never that simple, and the film inevitably twists in the screwball mode, driven, like the best of them, by a strong emotional undertow. The Wedding Banquet is about unconventional marriages of all sorts-including the "marriage" of gay and Asian culture, a topic that is lately coming to light largely through film. As the Village Voice's Georgia Brown points out, the film "has become a huge hit in Taiwan (and) marks the first time two men kiss on the large Taiwanese screen."