INTERVIEW: Two gay men wait a lifetime to find each other in ‘Twilight’s Kiss’
Photo: Twilight’s Kiss features performances by Ben Yuen and Tai-Bo. Photo courtesy of Film Forum / Provided by official site with permission.
Twilight’s Kiss, the new movie from writer-director Ray Yeung, finds two older men trying to find acceptance for their loving partnership, but they struggle with issues of family, shame and societal understanding. They are of a generation that remembers laws that discriminated against the gay community, and they followed paths that abided by social expectations. Now, in their twilight years, they have an option — albeit a difficult one — to live as their authentic selves.
Helping Yeung tell this story are the two actors Ben Yuen as Hoi and Tai-Bo as Pak. The movie is now playing in the virtual cinema from Film Forum in New York City.
“Originally I was living in New York,” Yeung said in a recent Zoom interview. “In 2015, I came back to Hong Kong because I wanted to make a Cantonese movie. Originally I’m from Hong Kong, but I moved to the States. So I came back to make the movie, and then I was looking for a topic which might be interesting. And I came across this book called the Oral Histories of Older Gay Men in Hong Kong, so the book is basically a collection of 12 interviews of elderly gay men who are 60 or 70 years old. And I thought it was fascinating, so I contacted the writer and asked him to introduce me to some of the interviewees.”
The filmmaker soon found out that some of the subjects in the book had died, so he felt a great deal of urgency to tell this story right away. He met with the surviving men who are profiled in Oral Histories, sitting with them in their apartments, and started to learn about their stories. “The screenplay wasn’t really completely based on one of them,” he said. “It was really a combination of the people and the spirit.”
Twilight’s Kiss shot on location on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong, which is the urban area attached to the mainland of China. The high-rise buildings and five-star hotels of Hong Kong Island, across the harbor, didn’t have the same character that Yeung was going for. “Actually on Kowloon side especially, past Mong Kok, that area is still very old in a way,” he said. “It still very much captures the old Hong Kong spirit, so therefore I really wanted to center the movie in that kind of location. And also it reflects the two protagonists, what their life is like and their social status as well.”
Finding Tai-Bo and Yuen, who have received rave reviews for their respective performances, took some time. The director said many of the 60-70-year-old actors he asked turned down the project. These former action stars would ask questions like “why me?” or “why do you think I want to play a gay part?” A few were firm in their answer: No. Others gave a provisional yes, but they had some stipulations: No kissing, no holding hands and no taking off their shirt.
“They have a set of rules that they didn’t want to do, so I didn’t want to work with them either,” Yeung said. “So it took me six or seven months, and I found Tai-Bo by watching a movie that he was in. And I thought he was very good, so I tried contacting him. And he was living in Taiwan already, so I actually had to fly to Taiwan to talk to him and gave him the script and asked him whether he wanted to do it. So he took a couple months to think about it, and eventually he came back and said yes. … Ben was actually in his 50s when we shot the film, and so we had to age him up a little bit. He was a bit easier because he actually has done a gay part on stage before, so he came on quite quickly.”
During the making of Twilight’s Kiss, Yeung came to appreciate the generational differences among the gay population in Hong Kong. He finds that the younger generation are more open and have lived lives with more acceptance, whereas the two main characters in Twilight’s Kiss have had a different journey. When they were in their 20s, there were laws against homosexual acts in Hong Kong.
“That really, really affected them,” Yeung said. “So a lot of the people that I interviewed, I said, ‘Well, now being gay is not so difficult, and you can find a partner,’ and things like that. But they have that very deep-seated shame inside them because when they were growing up or when they were in their 20s, because it was illegal they thought the whole thing was immoral. And they have this shame.”
He added: “Also you had to get married in order for this society to accept you, and also even if you come out there’s no way you can find a long-term partner because no one really is into a long-term relationship. So all these things are in their mind. Even though you talk to them, and you say, ‘Well, now it’s so different,’ they don’t really believe it. Or even if they think so, they think it’s for the young but not for them.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Twilight’s Kiss, written and directed by Ray Yeung, is now playing as part of Film Forum’s virtual cinema. Click here for more information and tickets.
