Pulsating 'Pillion' Tenderizes Hearts
- August Hammel
- 1 hour ago
- 4 min read
“Do you give?”
If you’ve heard this question in your ear before, you already know the answer. When Harry Melling’s meek and innocent Colin gets it from Alexander Skarsgård’s rugged and domineering Ray, he’s walking through the door to a whole new world. We’re not in Kansas anymore.
Harry Lighton’s debut feature film, Pillion, is not an easy sell for general audiences: what if your Mr. Right was a power exchange dom? Fun for the whole family, it is not, but it’s closer to it than you may think. Lighton’s film, while sexually explicit, titillating, and dripping over itself, is quite the conventional tale – for better and worse.
Colin feels aimless. A meter maid whose downtime is filled by turns in a barbershop quartet and awkward dates set up by his cancer-stricken matchmaking mum, Colin’s 30s aren’t proving to be the most exciting. That is, until he catches the eye of Ray, a sexy, leather-clad biker. After an illicit alleyway encounter on Christmas, the two quickly fall into a dominant/submissive liaison, wherein Colin learns to embrace his own aptitude for devotion. As it’s Colin’s first real relationship, the boundaries and limitations inherent to their dynamic quickly test his patience and cause quite the drama.
Where Pillion succeeds is also where it flounders. Lighton’s command of his characters and their dynamic is impeccably tracked on a narrative level, which is all the more impressive for the fact that it’s a debut. His direction is clean and confident as well as ostensibly character-driven, which allows much of his story to play out on his exceptionally expressive leads. Yet, this tidiness ultimately deprives the film of a proper edge that these role-playing characters feel suited to.
Assuming that there would be a more viscous perversion in a film because it revolves around kink may be a fool’s errand. Certainly, nobody can walk out of Pillion and say they felt it prudish. Still, there’s a sense that every scene is being cut with safety scissors. Eroticism and desire are often backseated for an emphasis on novelty and thrill. Ray’s outward presentation as a broad-shouldered viking of a motorcyclist is just as alluring as his kinkier side, with chains and commands aplenty. As layers of Ray’s interests are peeled back to Colin, the audience is left behind in Colin’s earlier timidity.
Thankfully, the shoulders upon which the film rests are as strong as Atlas’. Melling and Skarsgård spark from the moment the latter seductively slides into frame. Their chemistry powers the film the whole way through, and watching Melling’s face – open and receptive – convey an entire arc from curiosity to infatuation to doubt is a great joy. Skarsgård’s monumental beauty is as overwhelming for us as it is to Colin thanks to Lighton’s total control over his presentation: Ray is a man whose boundaries could never be changed under any circumstance and Skarsgård has a ball painting onto that blank canvas.
At San Francisco’s screening of Pillion at the historic Castro Theater, Harry Lighton and Harry Melling briefly spoke with Buffed Film Buffs on the press line.
August Hammel: Can you tell me one aspect of Colin that you [Harry Melling] were most frightened or excited to play, and that you [Harry Lighton] were frightened or excited to portray as the director?
Harry Melling: I think ‘frightened’ would just be doing it justice – I loved the script so much. I wanted to make sure that as an actor, I could honor and achieve what Harry [Lighton] had written. So that was my – not fear – but an exciting fear. I was really excited to go on this journey, I was excited to explore Colin and his sexual discoveries, working out what this relationship dynamic means to him. All that was thrilling to work out.
Harry Lighton: I was frightened and excited to see Colin wrestle.
I knew that some of the wrestling moves were going to require a great degree of knee flexibility, but fortunately it turns out Harry [Melling] has very flexible knees.
HM: I’m really flexible!
The ensemble is just as wonderful, with Scissor Sisters’ very own Jake Shears giving a beautiful, almost one-scene performance as someone who gives some tough and necessary perspective to Colin. Douglas Hodge is a wonderful beam-balancer of tone as Colin’s father, but it is Lesley Sharp as his mother who steals the whole movie. Declaring any one actor the heart of a film could be trite, more so when it’s the suffering mother, but Sharp’s prickly jabs mix with an innate warmth and naivety in a role that distinguishes the film in a tangible way. Lighton writes her protectiveness of Colin against Ray, and their push-and-pull during a pivotal scene is the film’s most deftly handled piece of dramatic storytelling. Yet, it’s also where the film buckles.
How Pillion deals with its central dynamic is mostly uninteresting. After a coy and erotic opening act, the film stalls out around the same conversation: Colin wants more, Ray shuts him down. In there, we get some amazing gags, like an alarm clock being used as a sex toy and some truly sexy moments, like those that occur in a forest getaway with the rest of Ray’s biker gang. However, they are few and far between moments of much more conventional emotional trappings. Nonetheless, Lighton shows immense promise as a filmmaker and as a writer and this is a sturdy introduction. Onto bigger and better.
Pillion is now in theaters everywhere.
-August
Comments