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Sex and sensibility

The Wedding Banquet. With Winston Chao Wen-hsuan, Mitchell Lichtenstein, May Chin Su-mei, Lang Hsiung, and Guei Ya-lei. Directed by Lee Ang. In English and Mandarin with English subtitles. On Edko circuit and other cinemas.

AN award-winner in America and a box office record-breaker in Taiwan, The Wedding Banquet deserves all the commercial success and critical acclaim it has so far garnered. This human comedy ranks as one of the best in the history of Chinese-language cinema.

A breakthrough for the manner in which it combines Hollywood-style narrative with Chinese characteristics, as well as its perceptive treatment of cultural and sexual issues, The Wedding Banquet is warm, moving, and frequently downright hilarious.

Director-writer Lee Ang, along with co-scriptwriters Feng Guangyuan and James Schamus, have turned a simple story-line into a richly nuanced family portrait. Tung (Winston Chao) and Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein) are a somewhat typical New York gay yuppiecouple. They are very much the ''old married couple'' until increasing parental pressure from Taiwan forces Tung to make a radical decision: marry Wei-wei (May Chin, making an impressive big screen debut), a Shanghainese painter desperately in need of a green card.

It's a marriage of convenience, until an impromptu visit by Jung's meddlesome parents makes the menage-a-trois extremely inconvenient. But The Wedding Banquet is no Green Card-style one-joke premise. Director Lee does not shrink from exploring the problems that such a visit inflicts on the relationships and the arduous process before the charade is transformed by mutual love and respect into grudging acceptance.

The Wedding Banquet is so filled with the kind of well-observed detail and expert timing that it is a spiritual cousin to the classic Hollywood comedies of an earlier era. Not that there is anything old-fashioned about the content. The house-cleaning scene, for instance, when Wei-wei, Tung, and Simon prepare the apartment for Mr and Mrs Gao's arrival: gone is the Ken doll and other gay paraphernalia; a half-naked photo of Tung is replaced by one in his ROC Army uniform; flamboyant posters substituted by MrGao's Chinese calligraphy.

Simon and Tung's gayness is portrayed in a manner that is neither stereotypical nor patronising. Homosexuality has never been portrayed so honestly in a Chinese picture, and is a far cry from the cliched queens of the Cantonese screen, such as Alan Tam and Sammo Hung in Pantyhose Hero.

Tung's sexual orientation is an important part of his character, but no more significant than his ''Chineseness'' or business acumen or any one of the multitude of characteristics that make up a human being. Simon and Tung are first and foremost a lovingcouple with a mature relationship, and as such have achieved something that has proven unattainable by the vast majority of heterosexual Hong Kong celluloid couples during the past two decades.

By no means is The Wedding Banquet an ''issues'' movie. It is first and foremost a family comedy, and Lee Ang shows a deft understanding of the art of comedy in his handling of the cast, which is comprised of both veteran actors and relative newcomers.

As the parents, Guei Ya-lei and Lang Hsiung (who also starred in Lee Ang's Pushing Hands ) are absolutely delightful.

Lee Ang's directoral skills have ripened since Pushing Hands, itself one of the best Chinese-language pictures released in Hong Kong last year. While Pushing Hands had a certain ''film school'' quality about it, The Wedding Banquet is extremely slick and highly commercial. Lee has taken a potentially cloying, sentimental premise and turned it into a polished motion picture that even such diverse viewers as Mr & Mrs Gao, Simon, Tung, and Wei-wei would doubtlessly be able to enjoy together.

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