The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 197

'The Wedding Banquet1 Wedded Mess Gay man's marriage to pacify Taiwanese parents begets laughs BY EDWARD GUTHMANN "Neil is not gay," Lee explains, "and when Nicky came out to us, it had a great impact. He was the kind of guy the girls would chase after tall, handsome, good future. It was really a shock." Lee isn't gay, either he's married to a Taiwanese microbiologist and has two children, ages 9 and 3 but says he could "totally sympathize" with the parent-son relationship in his film. "I was the first son, so a lot was expected of me. I raised so much hope: I was the one in the family who carried the load of expectation, pressure, holding up honor." When Lee became a film maker, his parents complained bitterly that he didn't follow a more conventional path.

And when he was married in a no-frills civil ceremony, his mother wept with shame. Lee re-created that scene for his film, but also gave his characters a traditional wedding banquet complete with 300-guest reception, lots of drinking, and a honeymoon-suite raid in which Wai-Tung and Wei Wei are forced to strip naked under their bed and play humiliating wedding-night games. "Personally, I can't stand wedding banquets," Lee says. "It's absurd. For the married couple, you pretty much play the puppet for your parents.

It's very imposing, sometimes obscene. But I thought, for the film, it was a very good way to observe humanity, especially for Chinese." To capture the truth about gay relationships, Lee drew support and advice wherever he could find it. "Nicky and Robert were very helpful a lot of lines came from them. We also had gay actors: Mitchell Lichtenstein, who plays Simon, is very open about being gay, which was a big help to me in directing him and Winston." By the time he was ready to shoot, Lee says, "I felt very comfortable and confident." Looking back, he adds, "I was very happy to go through that learning process; to do the whole thing is a great leap for me, a very valuable experience." Above, Mitchell Lichtenstein, Winston Chao and May Chin in 'The Wedding directed by Ang Lee, left CHRONICLE STAFf WRITER nnn HEN Ang Lee finished "The Wed-I ding Banquet," a comedy about a Lf gay Taiwanese who gets married to appease his parents, the film maker doubted that a Chinese audience would ever accept it. "It was scary for me," the director, 38, said during a San Francisco visit.

"No Chinese film had ever taken a positive attitude toward the gay lifestyle. And no Chinese film had ever shown two men kissing. This is the first one. It's a big thing." Prepared for the worst, Lee was stunned when the Taiwanese government film board gave "Banquet" a PG rating meaning that 12-year-olds were free to see it and even more surprised when the movie became a huge audience hit, breaking all previous box-office records in that country. "I'm very happy," said Lee, who attributes the film's success not only to its novelty, but to the fact that "it's an audience movie.

You don't have to work that hard to understand or enjoy it." The film also won a Golden Bear Award at this year's Berlin Film Festival, and took awards for best film and best director at the recent Seattle Film Festival. It opens Wednesday at the Gateway Theater. Made with Taiwanese money, but filmed and produced in New York, "The Wedding Banquet" tells the story of Wai-Tung (Winston Chao), a handsome and successful real-estate entrepreneur who lives in Manhattan with his longtime lover Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein), but performs an elaborate heterosexual charade for his tradition-bound parents. When the parents announce an impending visit, Simon proposes a marriage of convenience between Wai-Tung and his tenant Wei-Wei (May Chin), a beautiful but neurotic artist from mainland China. It seems so simple at the time: The marriage not only would pacify the parents, but give Wai-Tung a tax break and allow Wei-Wei to remain in the United States.

Based on a real-life situation, "The Wedding Banquet" was inspired by Nicky Lee can't give the last name a gay Taiwanese who lives in Washington, D.C., with his partner of 10 years, Robert. Like Wai-Tung in the movie, Nicky is "out" to his friends and co-workers, even to his sisters, but still keeps his sexuality a secret from his Taiwanese parents. "Occasionally," Lee says, "Nicky's parents would show up from Taiwan, and he and Robert would have to rearrange the furniture, take pictures down from the walls and remove anything that told what was going on." It was Lee's screen-writing partner, Neil Peng, also a friend of Nicky's, who saw the humor in the situation and prodded Lee to make the film. "The Wedding Banquet" opens Wednesday at the Gateway Theater. 1 A 0j I J' I ill 1 in nil immili IH If HEN "The Wedding Banquet" A -M onnri nt in TitifOw if time stein, oddly enough, who got the a retired t'ai chi master who comes to live with his computer-engineer son in New York and clashes with his American daughter-in-law.

Prior to that, Lee won acclaim for his master's thesis project, "Fine Line," a comedy about a young Chinese woman who dodges the immigration service and meets an Italian man who's on the lam from the Mob. In some ways, each film examines the conflict between Eastern and Western belief systems. "Eastern values are veryc family-oriented," Lee says, "and very differ- 5 ent from the West, which is individual-ori- ented. In the past, you were more yourS parents' son than yourself. You had to be very submissive to your parents ando observe filial piety." Eventually, Lee predicts, "the wholes Chinese society will be changed.

It may! take 200 years, but it's nonstopable the trend is toward democracy and so-called personal freedom and acceptance of different values." He auditioned on videotape, and then quit his job to fly over to New York for an interview. He stayed for the next three months, and I was his personal acting coach for three or four hours a day." Chao isn't gay, Lee says, "but I have a feeling he's very comfortable with the role. Most actors shy away from gay roles, but he pursued the part very enthusiastically." Lee's next project, "Eat Drink Man Woman," is a multipart comedy about a famous Taiwanese chef and his three unmarried daughters. "It deals with desire," he says. "The title was taken from Confucius, who said that food and sex were the basic desires of human nature." He plans to shoot it in Taiwan in the fall.

Like the work of Wayne Wang and Arthur Dong his fellow Chinese American film makers, Lee's films inevitably deal with Chinese values in transition. In his first feature, "Pushing Hands" (1991), he told the story of majority of attention despite the fact that female lead May Chin is a popular TV actress and recording artist in that country. Audiences immediately took to the character of Simon particularly his habit of butchering Mandarin with a thick American accent. "They just loved him," Lee says. "We flew him over to Taiwan a week after we opened the film, for a second wave of publicity, and there was a huge crowd.

They asked for autographs, threw him flowers, exploded firecrackers on top of him." Lichtenstein's co-star, Chao, was also well-received and recently was cast in a Taiwanese version of "Top Gun," playing an F-16 pilot. Prior to however, Chao had never acted. "He was a flight attendant for China Airlines for seven years," Lee says. "He's never lived in the States, but he heard about the part through a Taipei newspaper..