When word got around that one of the hottest (in more senses than one, it transpires) films in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes concerned the relationship between a biker and a sexually submissive stranger, more than a few anticipated some experimentally lubricious drama in the style of Kenneth Anger’s 1963 classic Scorpio Rising. Genitals smeared with mustard. Images of Nazis intercut with bike crashes. All that malarkey.
There is certainly a degree of explicit sex in Harry Lighton’s debut feature. When a line of submissives bend over in unison at a picnic, it is not because someone has dropped and lost the piccalilli. Maiden aunts of stereotypical probity should approach with caution.
Pillion, adapted from a novel by Adam Mars-Jones, is, however, a degree cosier and sweeter than that brief synopsis suggests. It is rather as if Norman Wisdom had stumbled among gay motorcyclists and, while remaining very much himself, decided to act as plaything for the tallest of their tribe.
Harry Melling, best known as Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films, is on top bashful form as Colin, an unprepossessing parking attendant from (where else?) the less-than-glamorous town of Bromley, on the edge of London.
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The film-makers are, perhaps, overdoing his nerdiness by having him sing in a barbershop quartet, but that activity does provide an opportunity for him to rub up against Alexander Skarsgard’s statuesquely imposing Ray. With just a few meaning glances, this colossal shard of biker, after enjoying the singers’ tunes in the pub, lures our Colin down a nearby alleyway for alfresco festivities.
A strictly stratified relationship is quickly established. When Colin comes around to Ray’s flat he makes the dinner, experiences submissive sex and then curls up on the floor at the bottom of the bed. He is persuaded to have his head shaved down to a cueball and to wear a padlock and chain around his neck.
All this is properly consensual, and Colin does seem to be emotionally elevated by the relationship. The distribution of parking tickets is a joy again. His parents, accepting of his sexuality, seem, before full details emerge, delighted that he has found a handsome new boyfriend.
As you might expect from any film that gets compared to Norman Wisdom flicks, Pillion is largely a comedy. Far from fetishising the fetishes (if that makes sense), Lighton’s film – produced by the Oscar-nominated Irishmen Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe, for Element Pictures – is always at home to the comic absurdities of Colin’s position.
Melling relishes the opportunity to mutter and fuss his way through a life that is, by turns, perversely exotic and cruelly mundane. Skarsgard is at least as funny as a man who, though godlike in demeanour, is committedly devoid of personality. He plays the piano in his soulless apartment. He walks his dog. He washes his insufferable motorbike.
Unless I am mistaken, he is always at the same point in his reading of Karl Ove Knausgard’s My Struggle. If he were 50 per cent less handsome (okay, maybe 75 per cent), nobody but nobody would agree to sleep at the base of his bed.
The film is gently interrogative of the boys’ lifestyle. It is meant to be awkwardly funny when Colin’s nice mum (Lesley Sharp), who has cancer, tells Ray off for mistreating her son, but she is expressing reasonable confusion at what she sees. Eventually, Colin himself raises, to little enthusiasm, the notion of having a “day off” from his subservient status.
At the heart of Pillion, a very English class of reasonableness brushes against an equally English interest in hierarchical kink. Nothing wrong with that sort of thing, but doesn’t it play terrible havoc with the knees.
In cinemas from Friday, November 28th
