Very few actors can play ice-cold and white-hot in the exact same moment, within a single glance, whether in close-up or long shot. Alain Delon was a master of it; so is Alexander Skarsgård. And yet the legendary star of 1967’s Le Samurai never wrestled someone in an ass-less singlet as a form of foreplay — to the best of our knowledge, at least; we haven’t seen all of Deloin’s early French films — which may give Skarsgård the edge in terms of subzero-sex-symbol status.
Maybe you’ve heard that the tall, pale, and handsome performer who graces writer-director Harry Lighton’s Pillion with his extraordinary, highly unreadable presence leans into his role as the dominant half in a sub-dom relationship, and that his scenes with co-star Harry Melling run the gamut from break-into-a-sweat explicit to five-alarm fire in progress. How heated you find the film’s rivalry between ecstatic abandon and emotional withholding is subjective, of course. But anyone who’s ever wondered what a rom-com collab between Nora Ephron and Tom of Finland might look like now has a definitive answer to that question.
Named after the seat that allows a passenger to ride on the back of a motorcycle, Pillion establishes its rules of engagement from the jump. Even before we’re properly introduced to Skarsgård’s Ray, he’s already an enigma wrapped in leather, and the sort of Prince Charming who prefers a sleek, all-black Ducati to a white steed. Melling’s Colin, meanwhile, enters the picture as one fourth of a barbershop quartet, complete with a straw boater and a striped jacket. He’s a voice willing to hide within others’ harmonies, the kind of guy the hopelessly meek might pity. His parents are supportive of their son’s sexual identity — overly supportive, some might say, given how his mom has set him up on a blind date with a gent after his singing gig. You can tell Colin’s not feeling it with the guy in the colorful “Alexa, Free Britney” T-shirt even before he slinks away to the bar.
And then, boom, here comes the meet-cute. Ray asks the bartender for some chips. He’s standing right next to Colin, staring him down. Then he drops some change and wordlessly gestures for Colin to settle his tab, too. Which the younger man does, obediently. Ray jots down his number, a location, a time to meet tomorrow. Never mind that it’s Christmas Eve, and a potential rendezvous would force Colin to leave a festive holiday dinner with his dad (Douglas Hodge) and terminally ill yet extremely upbeat mom (Lesley Sharp). His parents don’t mind: You go have your hookup with that attractive biker fella, sweetie. (Again: Very supportive.) Later, when Colin shows a co-worker a photo of Ray, she asks how someone who comes off like a walking, talking apology was able to bag such an erotic glacier of a boyfriend. “He says I have an aptitude for devotion,” Colin responds. And one-sided devotion turns out to be exactly what turns both of these guys on.
It’s easy to fixate on the film’s abundant displays of kink at the expense of all else, given Lighton’s fetishization of this particular BDSM biker scene; the source material, Adam Mars-Jones’ 2019 coming-of-age novel Box Hill, takes place in the 1970s, and there’s a certain throwback feel to the leather-daddy fantasies, even if the skintight outfits have been updated for the present day. But Pillion isn’t a movie about a subculture so much as one that happens to be set inside of one. It isn’t interested in the rules and codes that govern these rising Scorpios, and no one takes a time-out to explain what the modern equivalent of different colored handkerchiefs mean. This is a love story, unconventional to some yet totally normal to others, and though Skarsgård himself has stayed mum when asked about that categorization, you can see that it’s using the sub-dom dynamics to get at the way that intimacy and relationships operate on mutual understandings of give and take. Conscious coupling creates its own consensual ecosphere. I don’t like how you treat Colin, his mother tells Ray late in the film. “It’s not yours to like,” he replies.
A scene from Pillion.
Chris Harris/A24
Yes, Lighton and his collaborators know they’re pushing envelopes here. You don’t “accidentally” put Skarsgård shirtless in suspendered motoralls and force Melling to lick his boots, or stage a field trip to a lake that features what a colleague called “party bottoms.” You want screen representation of a highly specific queer lifestyle? You’ll get it. But Pillion never forgets there’s a deeper story happening underneath all the sex. This is why the casting is such a key factor here, less for the participants’ willingness to “go there” and more to get viewers past the sensationalistic aspects.
Melling knows how to play someone who’s a deer in the headlights regarding his own desire, and who begins to realize that his lack of power in this relationship is quietly leading to his own sense of personal empowerment. And though Skarsgård has never been afraid to play characters that fall somewhere between socially awkward and straight-up asshole — see his Succession tech billionaire, or his passive-aggressive documentarian in the Charli XCX mocku-romp The Moment — there’s a whole other level of impenetrable, aloof behavior and hard-to-decipher choices behind his Ray. It’s all the more striking when the actor finally does show that there’s an actual person behind the super-hot, super-controlling alpha in this equation. That’s also when you know that the beginning of the end has likely been set into motion as well.
That Pillion knows how to balance all of the outré bits of business and still deliver a bigger-picture emotional payoff — while ensuring those sequences make engines rev regardless of where you fall on the Kinsey scale — is no small feat. The fact that it also has the smarts to leave you with the notion that happiness is slavery for some and somehow never devolves into a mere different-strokes tolerance messaging is equally impressive. Every relationship is functional in its own way. Lighton’s movie gives you one that feels, on the surface, both strange and exotic in its particular push and pull. The manner that said pushes and pulls create a way for two people to communicate their love? That seems incredibly familiar.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
