‘The Wedding Banquet’ is a sign that the film industry can handle topics that in a previous generation would have been seen as beyond the pale and as a taboo. It is not just that this is about a couple seeking IVF but about two sets of gay couples who find strategic ways of planning their futures and the raising of children which would have once been outside the jurisdiction of a Hollywood comedy.

This is a comedy of manners in which we see how two same-sex couples intersect with one another in ways that would seem to defy the rules of logic as the urgent need for one of them to secure a green card so that they can stay in America against the wishes of their traditionalist grandmother who wants them to return to Korea to run the family business lends itself to some convoluted and implausible synchronicities and coincidences.

We see the central foursome all having to find practical solutions to their respective fertility and visa issues, and there are moments of pathos in which we see how one of the men from one couple and one of the women in the other have a sham marriage in order to appease their family, only for different layers of the onion to be peeled and for the older family members for whom they are ostensibly putting on the performance to see through the façade and to exhibit layers of subtlety and open-mindedness hitherto overlooked.

The tropes of a conventional romcom are in place, but all the couples are gay and mixed race in ways that feels genuinely progressive. The lesson is a very clear one that family units may take a range of forms, but they are no less sacred and deserving of our sympathy than when they comprise a more heteronormative structure. ‘The Wedding Banquet’ is proof that a film can find flexible ways of tweaking an enduring formula and even give it greater longevity.

Relationships, the film is telling us, may be complicated and may not always last the course, but they are worth fighting for if they are grounded in love and respect, and ‘The Wedding Banquet’ comes with more than a few life lessons about the need to both honour traditions while demonstrating integrity and respect for a new generation’s need to find their own way through life’s vicissitudes and setbacks.