Pillion’s love story ends where most of cinema would begin: with a kiss.
Harry Lighton’s debut movie has made a bit of a splash this year, despite the seemingly hyper-specific premise. Adapted from the Adam Mars-Jones novel Box Hill, the movie is a BDSM biker romance set in Bromley, following the relationship between Colin (Harry Melling), a reserved young gay man dealing with his mother’s terminal illness, and Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), a mysterious and dominant biker who leads Colin into his first dominant-submissive dynamic.
And it’s a great film, it really is; Melling has swiftly become one of my favourite actors working today, from The Pale Blue Eye to Wolf Hall, and this is another extraordinary performance to his bow – witty, vulnerable, and deft, there’s a precision to every moment on-screen that I can’t get enough of. Skarsgård is fully leveraging his appeal as a sex symbol here, but he’s a seriously strong actor too, and his chemistry with Melling and ability to imbue the oft-icy Ray with humanity is sincerely impressive. But this is, at the end of the day, a film about intimacy, and that’s what I’d like to talk a little about today.
When it comes to intimacy in film, sex is often the be-all and end-all of what we see on screen. Romance builds around the promise of physical intimacy, with the climactic moment often coming (if you’ll excuse the pun) when the couple fall into bed together after a back-and-forth that has lasted most of the runtime. But, in Pillion, sexual contact is virtually immediate – within minutes of meeting on their first date, Colin gives Ray oral sex in an alleyway, and that’s far from the last of it. The sex is kinky, sure, but it’s also relatively mundane in its depiction – things hurt, things don’t work, people make weird noises and do weird things at weird times – the movie’s approach to sexuality is playful, even comedic. Their physical connection is intimate by definition, but that’s just where their relationship starts.
Because Pillion’s intimacy comes in the form of this intense dynamic that the two share, and how it does – and doesn’t – fit into what they both need from their relationship. Melling’s Colin has, according to Ray, an “aptitude for devotion”; he eagerly takes on his role as the submissive partner in the relationship, changing his physical appearance and his lifestyle to better fit with what Ray wants from him. He fits comfortably into Ray’s life at first, into the strangely cold and empty apartment Ray keeps for himself. They might not kiss on the mouth, but, from both sides, there is an intimacy in the honesty of what the want in this unusual dynamic, and their willingness to give it to one another. Ray’s careful construction of this world allows him to control how far Colin can reach into his life, and, at first, it seems to work.
But what makes Pillion so interesting, for me, is the way in which that fails. Colin craves more traditional relationship milestones, like meeting his parents and sharing time together that is not defined by their dynamic – and Ray tries, he really does. He meets with his parents (in one of the film’s best scenes, as Lesley Sharpe reminds us all why she’s one of the great British actors of her generation), he takes him to the movies, he cooks him breakfast, he undoes the carefully-crafted world he has made for himself that can fit Colin inside of it. And, at the film’s climax, they kiss – for the first time, and the last.
And it’s that kiss that serves as the end of their relationship. Ray’s world doesn’t work like this; Colin fits into his life in servitude of their dynamic, not as a romantic partner. Their kiss, though consensual, signals a shift in their relationship, a shift that Ray cannot stand to face, and he leaves without a trace by the next day. What exactly drives Ray’s mortal fear of this kind of intimacy is never made clear, though the movie leaves room for speculation; what we know for sure is that Ray cannot see Colin as both a man he dominates and a man he kisses, his willingness to dominate him attached to his ability to keep him at an intimate arm’s length. The film’s framing of a kiss at the end of their love story is a brilliantly subversive one, and one that recontextualizes the relationship that came before in a really fascinating way.
I really enjoyed the movie’s epilogue, of Colin moving on to another relationship with a similar dynamic that better fits his needs as a whole. When it comes to non-conventional sexual and romantic relationships, fiction often falls back on framing these encounters as one-offs excursions or aberrant little dalliances driven by certain life circumstances. But Pillion sees it as a chance for Colin to better identify the kind of intimacy he needs – not one divorced from a dominant-submissive dynamic, but one that folds more traditional forms of intimacy and romance into that form of relationship.
Pillion is a brilliant film, a curious, witty, and incisive exploration of submissive, dominance, and the unusual paths through which we can find connection. I would be really interested to hear your interpretation of the movie below, especially with regards to sex, love, and intimacy, so drop into the comments and let’s get into it!
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By Lou MacGregor
No But Listen 