Here to prove there’s nothing gentle about true love is an intensely English story of romance, devotion and loss from first-time feature director Harry Lighton, who has created something funny and touching and alarming – like a cross between Alan Bennett andTom of Finlandwith perhaps a tiny smidgen of what could be called a BDSM Wallace and Gromit. It’s basically what Fifty Shades of Grey should have been.Pillion is adapted from the 2020 novelBox Hill by Adam Mars-Jones: a shy traffic enforcement officer falls for the ultimate dominant alpha male – an impossibly handsome, strong, emotionally impassive biker who casually demands complete domestic obedience in exchange for the privilege of being reamed with athletic vigour and thrilling lack of sensitivity, often in a specially modified wrestling outfit.Harry Melling, who becomes more impressive with every screen outing, plays Colin, a sweet, shy guy who lives at home with his mum and dad, Pete (Douglas Hodge) and Peggy (Lesley Sharp) who is in the final stages of cancer and who is always tenderly trying to set him up with dates. Heartbreakingly, Colin sings with his dad’s cheesy close-harmony barbershop quartet every Sunday in the pub in boaters and bow-ties.
It is here that he somehow catches the imperious gaze of leather-clad Ray (played with kingly and sexy entitlement by Alexander Skarsgard) who invites or in fact orders Colin to meet him behind Primark at 5pm for a blowjob. Soon Ray is requiring the gigglingly thrilled Colin to cook and clean and shop for him (though of course never permitted touch his motorbike) and sleep on the floor like a dog at his bland house in Chislehurst while Ray reads Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle in bed.Colin – who symbolically rides pillion behind Ray – discovers in himself the ecstatic vocation of the sub. He shaves his head to fit in with Ray’s supercool biker compadres, which incidentally makes him look like a young Christopher Eccleston.But when does sexual role-play become dysfunction? Or coercive control? What does Ray do for a livjng? Is Ray an abuser? Colin’s sceptical mum Peggy actually finds a harsher monosyllabic word for him when Ray finally gets over himselfand deigns to accept an invitation to Sunday lunch with this well-meaning elderly couple that he haughtily rejects in any capacity as his parents-in-law. Could it be that only Peggy is uncool enough to have seen through Ray and seen how dangerous the situation is? Or is she just another person who doesn’t get it? (And these uncomprehending people perhaps still include the besotted Colin himself.)It is a real love story, and the movie amusingly and touchingly takes us through the final stages and out the other side, to where Colin has grown or at any rate changed as a person who has come to terms with what he is and what he wants, the way that Ray clearly did long ago. His dad’s barbershop quartet sign off with a rendition of Smile Though your Heart is Breaking. It seems like the only possible advice.
Pillion has premiered at the Cannes film festival