Ray Yeung | Suk suk (Twilight's Kiss) / 2019

brief encounter

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ray Yeung (screenwriter and director) Suk suk (Twilight's Kiss) / 2019

 

This is a truly beautiful, loving, and quite painful story of two elderly closeted gay men who, despite their sexuality, have created families in which they are still very much entwined. We in the West, often envy and praise the Asian culture’s embracement of the elderly into family life. But there are obvious dilemmas that come with such heavily entrenched familial relationships for older gay man such as the central figures in this film, Pak (Tai-Bo) and Hoi (Ben Yuen).

     Pak, still married to an embittered woman, Ching (Patra Au), whose anger with him has spread to her own children, including her daughter who is pregnant and about to marry the unemployed father of her unborn child; she is particularly incensed when the couple, having no money, determine to have a small, inexpensive marriage. But we can easily perceive that she knows or at least suspects her husband’s life-time activities and is suspicious of his day and sometimes night-time absences.

     Pak is still working as a taxi driver, a job which evidently, over the years, has allowed him to support his family well. These days, however, we don’t really see him picking up customers as much as using the taxi as a vehicle to cruise between public bathrooms, where, in part because of his age, he rarely is able to engage in any sexual activity.

     Coming out of one such public facility, he encounters Hoi on a public bench nearby and momentarily joins him. But Pak seems to desire immediate sexual contact, while Hoi seeks friendship first, and the meeting ends up with Pak walking away.

   Hoi lives with his son Wan (Chun Yip Lo), his wife, and young daughter. Hoi, who divorced evidently early on, has raised Wan alone. But the son is now rather a monster, a strict fundamentalist Christian who has demanded his own father convert and criticizes his elder for almost all his loving behavior towards his daughter and refusals to attend the endless church gatherings the family embraces. Wan is like a puritan, unable to accept nearly anything outside of the narrow world which he inhabits, even his father serving up sweet puddings to his grandchild. Even more than Pak’s closed off relationship, Hoi is denied almost any joy he might take from his elderly life with the pleasures of family unless they meet with the church strictures which are so narrow that pleasure seems to have been erased.

      Both men, however, are devoted to their families, proud of what they have made of their hard work and suffering. But now, particularly, in their elder age when you might have been given some possibility of enjoying that hard work, they are denied, in various ways, the pleasures life might offer them and which they have so long denied themselves.

    Of the two, Hoi is the far more savvy regarding the gay world. It is he who takes Pak to a gay sauna and leads him to a private back room where they have sex. Hoi, moreover, is involved with the Mature Tongzhi Society, a social group that caters to men 60, who young men are trying to get involved with supporting a governmental project to create senior citizen residences exclusively for gay people. The only problem is that almost all of the men of their social group are still closeted and fearful of coming out to their families, and no one seems willing to appear as a spokesperson for the appeal.

    In the meantime, Hoi and Pak see more of each other and grow closer and fonder through their secret meetings. Hoi, knowing that his family will be away for the weekend, invites Pak to join him at their home where he will prepare a meal. And one of the most brilliant and wonderfully touching outings the two men have together is at the wet market where almost as a couple they shop for dinner, Hoi knowledgeably bartering for the prices with grocers he seems to know, and, at some points, Pak insisting on paying. The meal they cook and share is as close to a real domestic relationship that these men can ever imagine, Hoi insisting Pak eat everything like an overeager and caring partner whose Pak’s own wife has never been.

     The love between grows, even as we observe Hoi, in particular, reaching out to others of his group who find it difficult to even return home or shop for themselves.

     Yet Hoi, indoctrinated by his love for his son into Christian fundamentalism feels it necessary to gift a necklace with a silver cross on it to his new friend, a gift which the agnostic Pak doesn’t know how to react to until Hoi explains that if they die, how will he be able to find him without the token.

     Pak, in turn, invites Hoi to his daughter’s wedding banquet which he and his wife are now paying for. Introduced merely as a friend, however, Hoi remains in the shadows. As Alison Simon writes in Variety: “As Hoi observes the social dynamics in Pak’s extended family, so different from his own, you can see in his eyes the mental acknowledgement that dating a married man is asking for trouble.”

     More importantly, as a wedding present to his new son-in-law, Pak turns over his taxi to him so that he might obtain a taxi license and earn a living to support his beloved daughter. There is a final goodbye to his home away from his house, as he lovingly shows the newlywed how to wash and care for the vehicle, and how to help make the riders feel that this is his home where they are temporarily welcome.

     But giving up his taxi also means losing all mobility and, even more importantly, any logical excuses of leaving his house.

     Hoi, himself, has abandoned his life to his pious Christian son. Even while listening in his own room to the rather quiet to the testimony of one of his friends who has finally come forward to speak out for senior houses for gay people, he is told by Wan to turn it down since it might wake up their daughter, Grace.

     Both men, loving their family, still must sacrifice their love and sexuality. The joy retirement might provide them is even missing from their lives, where both are imprisoned by their pasts.

    In the final scene, having stolen away by bus, Pak enters a Christian church, not for any religious purpose but just to remind himself of the one true love he was briefly permitted in his life, Hoi.

     Throughout, as in many Chinese films, a song accompanies these men’s most intimate moments, this sun by Qing Shan, 微風細雨 which basically translates in “Gentle breeze and drizzle,” which basically reiterates the sad autumns of their lives.

      I saw this movie several years ago, when it was first released, but I guess I wasn’t ready to write about it, although I loved it immediately. Finally, I have been able to watch it again and comment. I can only say, as I have in the past, that Hong Kong director Ray Yeung is one of the best of contemporary gay filmmakers.

 

Los Angeles, July 30, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).