Try a Little Tenderness
By Alexander Mooney
Pillion
Harry Lighton, U.K., A24
Little Peggy March’s cheery chart-topper “I Will Follow Him” serves as a theme song of sorts for Harry Lighton’s feature debut Pillion. Though the track that actually opens the film is Betty Curtis’s Italian cover “Chariot (Su Mi Ciaro),” many viewers will already know the English lyrics to this iconic, lovesick earworm: “I will follow him / follow him wherever he may go / there isn’t an ocean too deep / a mountain so high it could keep / keep me away.” Despite its jaunty sweetness, the insistent tune illustrates the force of will it takes to sustain such devout passivity.
It’s a fitting overture for Pillion, in which the meek, lonesome Colin (Harry Melling) stumbles ass-over-teakettle into the role of live-in submissive to the brooding biker Ray (Alexander Skarsgård). Their thorny dynamic goes beyond Colin yielding to Ray’s constant physical and emotional demands; they engage in bouts of wrestling that, given their differences in strength and stature, Colin has no chance of winning, and throughout their affair, the timid late bloomer must doggedly assert himself to maintain this position of subservience. Consequently, his journey of sexual discovery leads to a long-overdue coming-of-age.
Lighton’s film is, like the imbalanced romance it depicts, multivalent. It is outwardly dispiriting and disarmingly sweet, narratively brutal and formally subdued, thematically outré and structurally prosaic. It articulates taboo subjects with the matter-of-factness of the everyday, equally in tune with the absurdity and mundanity of the relationship it portrays. Pillion both thrives and falters in this confluence of contradictions, which are concretized throughout the film as various highs and lows rippling across Melling’s mercurial face. The actor deftly guides us through this confounding entanglement, toggling between overlapping states of elation, anguish, confusion, and desperation.
During their first sexual encounter, Ray leads Colin to a dark alleyway and forces him to the ground via finger lock. Beneath his mop of curls, Colin’s face is alight with curiosity and arousal. “Wow, you're strong,” he gasps through breathless laughter, which soon turns into yelps of pain. When Ray unzips his leather overalls and whips out a girthy prosthetic dong (complete with a Prince Albert), Colin’s first impulse is to look at the ground, but after a beat, he leans forward and gets to work. We gather from Ray’s reactions, and the awkward Foley, that Colin isn’t exactly well-practiced, but Ray quickly interrupts with orders to lick his boots. Colin seems initially repulsed by the action, turning away to spit between hesitant laps of leather and concrete, but by the time Ray helps him to his feet, Colin seems spellbound.
From here, the film will continue to align itself with Colin’s perspective. Lighton and Melling, in lock step, clearly delineate the blurred lines between attraction and disgust, carefully modulating our responses to the myriad indignities Colin experiences. His jacket lives on the floor below the hooks in the foyer; Ray’s dog occupies the other half of the couch, and Colin stands behind it; Ray cleans his motorbike with a care and tenderness that Colin does not merit; he is forced to sleep on the floor at the foot of Ray’s bed and thanklessly prepare his every meal. Most importantly, they never kiss.
There are many ways in which Pillion diverges decisively from its source material, Adam Mars-Jones’s 2020 novel Box Hill (subtitled “A Story of Low Self-Esteem”). The action is shifted from the late 1970s to the present day; Colin is described as “short and fat,” while his screen counterpart is tall and scrawny; his job as a tube driver is downgraded to that of parking attendant; and most significantly, the characters are drastically aged. Colin is freshly 18 at the start of Box Hill, while Ray is somewhere in his late twenties. Melling is 37, playing late-twenties at the youngest in Pillion, while his co-star is 49. In both versions, Colin lives at home with an ailing mother and doting father (a role model for devoted submission), which means something altogether different for a man pushing 30. As does the disbelief shared by these insecure, inexperienced men that a stud like Ray would give them the time of day. Ditto Colin’s increasingly insistent perception of apparently abusive gestures as signs of unconventional love, which is much easier to digest from a protagonist with a fully developed frontal lobe.
Crucially, Pillion forgoes a scene from the book in which Ray rapes Colin, who describes the encounter as sexual assault but later rationalizes it: “I’d thought he was going to kill me with his cock, but when I found he hadn’t, after a while I started to cheer up, and to think it hadn’t been too bad, all in all.” Box Hill’s view of its central romance is decidedly murkier than Pillion’s. I haven’t read the book, but critical commentaries on the reliability of its first-person, stream-of-consciousness narration (which continues without chapter breaks for 121 pages) suggest a truly and provocatively ambiguous vantage from the inside of a cage. Mars-Jones, a critic himself, characterized his book thusly: “Gay people can be perfectly horrid. I set out to write scenes that would test a phone y tolerance to breaking point.”
By contrast, Pillion offers complexity in lieu of ambiguity, favors sweetness over slipperiness, and (for the most part) trades cruelty for comedy. It is stifled by the polite conventionality of its form and confined by the overt clarity that comes with it––Skarsgård’s subtly textured performance embodies this catch-22, a peacocking caricature bursting through the seams of its unmistakably human frame. This is not to say that the film is in any way ersatz––movies, adaptations especially, shouldn’t be judged for what they are not. Lighton’s direction is elegant, opting for patient camera movements and deadpan stillness; his script is supple, bending to the capricious moods and scenarios of its central pair; his actors are dexterous, both physically and emotionally; and his tone is gracefully balanced between humor and pathos. Pillion’s more optimistic take on these polarities of power is a welcome one. BDSM does not have a history of positive representation in the mainstream, though the film’s comic approach doesn’t fully break from that status quo. Quite poignantly, Colin shaving his head at Ray’s behest––described by Mars-Jones as a form of “ritual humiliation”––is given an expanded meaning in the film, not just as a gesture of ownership but also one of belonging, however precarious.
The film is at its most compelling when Ray breaks his cruel composure. Colin’s mother dies from cancer, not long after an altercation between her and Ray at the dinner table. Colin deliberately burns his hand on the stove and collapses, a test which Ray passes with flying colors. He calmly cares for Colin’s wounds, orders them pizza, and allows him entry to the bed at the end of the night. Colin knows that this is a one-time deal, but the sudden exposure to the kindness he’s been lacking irreversibly opens a line of thought: one “day off” per week. Ray is nonplussed at the suggestion, flatly refusing until Colin, in an unprecedented display, steals his motorbike and takes it for a half-naked joyride.
They enjoy their day off in a destabilizing sequence that, startlingly, shows the couple navigating populated streets, torn out of their twisted fantasy and dropped into the real world. Their merriment climaxes with a sprint through the park, at which point they fall to the ground in exhaustion. When their predestined tussle comes, Ray lets Colin win. Colin straddles Ray, who lays on his back, looking up at his devotee for the first time, out of his depth. Colin leans in, hesitant, and Ray comes up to meet him. When they part from this prolonged, passionate kiss, Ray looks as though he’s been stabbed. They both know that he is hopelessly stuck in his ways, but Colin is still taken by surprise when, after a prolonged radio silence, he finds Ray’s flat completely empty.
In Box Hill, Ray dies in a motorcycle crash two-thirds in, with Colin’s grief giving shape to the book’s concluding arc. But Lighton spares Ray, giving Colin a more constructive kind of grief; in the final sequence, we see him regain his locks of hair and reenter the dating pool with his self-esteem, and most importantly, his ground rules, locked firmly into place. Emotionally, sexually, and psychologically, everything adds up, but there’s a deflating tidiness to this conclusion. Rendering the unconventional with the language of convention is, in theory, a subversive gesture, but what is lost when the coarse and messy facets of humanity are wedged into received frameworks? Pillion is a precision instrument, performing the job of a serrated edge with the blade of a scalpel; it’s a film of hard feelings and abraded wounds that leaves no unsightly stains.