Pillion: Aloof Alexander Skarsgärd Meets Puppy-Eyed Harry Melling in Offbeat Dom-Com

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B+

Both rudely funny and soppy in a terribly English way, Pillion is a rough-sex romance that will be relatable to anyone who has fallen hard for an emotionally distant lover. That the love story takes place within the subculture of English gay bikers provides added sociological gravitas. Bonus interest: the title refers to the back seat on a motorcycle.

Confidently led by first-time director Harry Lighton, and based on the 2020 novel Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones, the film stars the puppy-eyed Harry Melling (Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films) as Colin. He’s a gentle young traffic officer who lives in the Bromley area of London with his mom Peggy (Lesley Sharp) and dad Pete (Douglas Hodge).

He and his dad sing together in a barbershop quartet down at the local, which is pretty much the limit of Colin’s social life. His loving working-class parents accept that he is gay and sympathize with his loneliness.

Mom Peggy, who is being treated for terminal cancer, is eager to set him up with a suitable partner before she dies. During one of those blind dates at a pub, Colin encounters Ray (Alexander Skarsgärd), a towering blond man-God who slips him a note to meet him in an alley.

There, Colin licks Ray’s dirty motorcycle boots and, gagging, performs oral sex on his new idol. Afterward, Colin admits he’s not good at this sort of thing but asks for a chance for more practice. Ray, who recognizes that Colin has a “talent for devotion,” invites Colin to his house, to be his submissive everything: cooking, cleaning, bouts of acrobatic sex, walking Ray’s Rottweiler and sleeping on the floor instead of the bed.

Eventually, Colin shaves his head and is accepted as part of Ray’s bike gang, which is strictly divided between subs and leather daddies, and they head out on a picnic and some raunchy group activities where Colin experiences humiliations beyond the kind he enjoys. (Jake Shears of the group Scissor Sisters has a small role as Kevin, a fellow sub.)

One academic take on BDSM culture is that it’s a form of erotic theatre exploring power relations. Class differences are a key part of Ray and Colin’s relationship in a coming-of-age story that has parallels to Lone Scherfig’s 2009 film, An Education.

Ray is apparently educated — he reads Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle in bed, plays piano, and lives in a middle-class suburb with no visible means of support. Basically, he’s a bike bore with great abs, and while Peggy says a biker “sounds fun,” the man’s lack of personal history and family ties has her concerned.

After Colin repeatedly begs him, Ray reluctantly agrees to meet his parents. (Roy tells Ray about the benefits of support stockings, which might be considered a form of light bondage) but the dinner falls apart when Ray accuses Peggy of being “backward” in her view toward BDSM culture.

Following Peggy’s death, Colin has an emotional breakdown that leads to a breakthrough. His grief awakens Ray’s sympathetic impulses. He lets Colin sleep in his bed for a change and even gives him a day off from being a submissive so they can act like an “ordinary” couple on a date.

That brief window of liberation — of having the boot off his neck for an afternoon — emboldens Colin, and he begins to set out to renegotiate the relationship contract. This does not lead Ray to undergo full Mr. Darcy transformation from insufferable brute to loving helpmate. But really, how much can you expect from a guy whose idea of sentiment is to wear tattoos of his pet dogs on his chest?

Pillion, which won the Best Screenplay prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section as well as prizes at the British Independent Film Awards and Gotham Independent Film, has been praised for its “non-judgmental” view of BDSM. I don’t really buy it.

Heterosexual kink has already enjoyed positive public relations in such films as Babygirl or the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise. And the pragmatic details of the rough same-sex coupling in Pillion are more comic than erotic. “Get a butt plug. You’re too tight,” orders Ray, to which Colin breathlessly replies, “Yeah, lovely. That sounds like a plan.”

Skarsgärd, physically swaggering and mentally obtuse, is genuinely funny here but his character is a cartoon and Melling’s Colin is so grovelingly obsequious that you might feel an impulse, not a kind impulse, to give him a smart smack just to wake him up.

Pillion. Written and directed by Harry Lighton, based on the novel by Adam Mars-Jones. Starring Harry Melling, Alexander Skarsgärd, Douglas Hodge, and Lesley Sharp. Opens February 12 in Toronto (Cineplex Varsity, Cineplex Yonge-Dundas), Montreal (Cinema du Parc) and February 13 in Toronto (Fox Theatre), Montreal (Cineplex Cinema Forum), and Vancouver (Scotiabank Theatre).