Coming of age stories don’t come much more eccentric, or X-rated, than Pillion, the story of a mild-mannered man and the BDSM daddy who takes him into his home, under his wing, and on a journey of stern self-discovery.
A breakout hit at last year’s Cannes and New York Film Festivals, Harry Lighton’s boundary-pushing queer drama (February 6, in theaters) has a confidence that initially eludes its protagonist, whose affair with a mysterious hunk transforms his perspective on love, happiness, pleasure, and power. With a fearless and funny Alexander Skarsgård as England’s most intimidating and alluring dom, it’s a steamy, sad, and amusing snapshot of desire and identity.
Colin (Harry Melling, best known for playing the Harry Potter villain Dudley Dursley) is a withdrawn parking enforcement officer who spends his evenings singing in a barbershop quartet at a local pub with his father Pete (Douglas Hodge). At one such performance, Colin’s mom Peggy (Lesley Sharp)—whose variety of wigs hide the bald head she has due to terminal cancer—sets her son up on a date with a random guy, indicating both her casual open-mindedness and Colin’s timidness.
This get-together doesn’t go anywhere, but while soliciting tips at the end of one song, Colin is roundly ignored by a Teutonic biker (Skarsgård) in a striped leather jacket who, a short time later, gives him a card inviting him to a rendezvous.
Given that he appears to have no friends and lives with his parents (a sure sign of his stunted development), Colin reacts to this turn of events with barely suppressed excitement, not least of which because this stranger—whose name, we’ll soon learn, is Ray—is, by all realistic standards, out of his league. If Colin is surprised that Ray is interested in him, he’s even more startled by their meet-up, during which Ray takes him into an alley, engages him in a feats-of-strength contest, and has him perform oral sex.
When that’s not up to Ray’s standards, he instead orders the young man to lick his boots as he pleasures himself, and the fact that Colin acquiesces to these demands confirms that he wasn’t lying when he told Ray he’d do “whatever you want.”
Thus, a bizarre romance is born, and writer/director Harry Lighton, in his feature debut, handles his spiky material with both wry literalness and a keen focus on the shifting thoughts and feelings lurking beneath the surface of his odd-couple characters. From shots of the racing countryside (from the POV of those in cars and on motorcycles), to slow-motion close-ups of Colin’s arms wrapped around Ray’s torso, Pillion conveys a tangible sense of its protagonist’s excitement and bliss.
On their second date, Colin visits Ray’s flat and is promptly and brusquely commanded to cook dinner, after which he’s left to stand behind the couch as Ray eats and watches TV alongside his dog. At bedtime, Colin assures his host that he doesn’t snore or routinely get up in the middle of the night to pee. Consequently, he’s permitted to sleep on the rug at the foot of Ray’s bed, which is better than the alternative of slumbering in the hallway.
Colin embraces his newfound role as Ray’s submissive without either of them overtly establishing the rules of their relationship, and Pillion attunes itself to the former’s euphoria over finding someone who alleviates his loneliness without forcing him to overcome his meekness.
For Colin, this is an ideal situation, but it increasingly troubles Peggy, who’s perturbed by Ray’s mysteriousness; Colin knows nothing about his dominating paramour except that he demands subservience, habitually washes his motorcycle in the morning, and pals around with fellow gay bikers who boast similar obedient partners. In a simpler film, Peggy would be the bigoted obstacle in Colin’s journey toward self-actualization.
Yet Lighton extends compassion and generosity to all his subjects, such that when the dying mom confronts Ray over lunch—an engagement that the biker clearly doesn’t want to attend—her concern is treated with the same respect as Ray’s objection and Colin’s embarrassment and fear.
Whether it’s an early bout of wrestling that concludes with Ray instructing his charge to buy a sex toy to facilitate future trysts, or a biker gang excursion to a pond at which Ray plays with Colin’s affections as a means of exerting further control—a tactic that, in the final tally, draws them closer together—Pillion doesn’t skimp on the explicitness.
Lighton, however, cares less about shallow titillation than navigating the links between passion and dignity, eroticism and self-knowledge.
In that regard, he’s immensely aided by his two leads, whose yin-yang chemistry is the material’s throbbing pulse. As the daunting Ray, Skarsgård is cold-hearted to the point of humorousness, his curt directives and nonchalant indifference and arrogance producing more than a few chuckles. The deft Melling, meanwhile, makes Colin a complex stew of insecurities and longings, all of them grappling with each other as he proceeds down his chosen path.
Colin and Ray seem, for a time, like a perfectly bonkers match. However, the fundamental imbalance of their psychosexual tug-of-war invariably begets tension, and Pillion dramatizes their late push-pull with the same dexterity that defined its early going.
In a bedroom conversation that turns out to be pivotal for their (shared and individual) futures, Ray states that he knows Colin loves him, but “that’s not what this is about,” to which Colin replies that he believed everything was about love. The lines drawn by these two are rigid for reasons that make sense for them and yet are destined to break, and the director grants both men grace as they strive to locate a satisfying middle ground—and, eventually, to face truths about themselves and each other.
Despite being about a relationship that’s out of the ordinary (to say the least), Pillion never loses sight of its universal ideas about loneliness, acceptance, and seizing happiness in whatever form fits best.
Far from Fifty Shades of Grey-style pulp, Lighton’s maiden directorial effort turns out to be a keen portrait of finding yourself via testing inhibitions, taking risks, and going to scary and exhilarating extremes—a process that, in this case, just happens to be enabled by chains, locks, and healthy handfuls of lubricant.
