The original title of Twilight’s Kiss is Suk Suk (Chinese Title叔.叔). The word Suk in Cantonese Chinese means Uncle or a man of a certain age; true to its title, Twilight’s Kiss is a story of two dedicated family men in their twilight years who are inspired by a chance encounter to embrace their sexuality, while at the same time facing difficult choices of whether or not to walk away from the family life they have each worked hard to build.
70-year-old Hong Kong taxi driver Pak is not about to retire. Partly because he doesn’t want to get bored, partly because he has a secret habit during his working day of visiting one of the city’s public parks, where he gets his sexual fix. When he meets Hoi, who is retired, sitting in the park waiting to pick up his granddaughter, Pak cuts to the chase and asks Hoi for a quick sexual exchange. Surprisingly, his bluntness is met with a gentle, “Why don’t we become friends first?”
When the two men meet again, their secret sexuality finds fulfillment in a gay spa, and their desire to spend more time together starts to cause rifts in their family lives. Hoi is divorced and lives with his religious son; Pak is the traditional Asian patriarch who says little and pays little attention to his homemaker wife. The new relationship introduces Pak to the larger aging gay community, where Hoi and his friends discuss the senior gay movement in Hong Kong. This is when director Yeung’s focus turns to that community: they are unwilling to stay in the shadows, and with the help of the younger generation, start to lobby for gay rights as well as for retirement homes for gay seniors.
Twilight’s Kiss is Ray Yeung’s third feature and his first Cantonese language film. He previously directed Cut Sleeve Boys and Front Cover, gay-themed comedies with a conventional storyline. However, in Twilight’s Kiss, Ray takes the docu-drama approach, with news flashes highlighting issues facing the aging and homosexual community (known as the “gay and grey”) in Hong Kong. Hong Kong only legalized homosexual relations between men in 1991, and the movie shows that the social stigma of homosexuality still remains.
Twilight’s Kiss scored nominations in major categories in Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards, as well as in the Hong Kong Film Awards.