Successful romances star at least one looker. I don’t mean someone attractive. I mean an actor who gazes at their scene partner with such delight that we swoon, too. Clark Gable was a looker. Diane Keaton was a looker. The combined eyeball voltage of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone is so powerful that it’s turned silly scripts into hits.
Harry Melling is a late-blooming looker. Onscreen most of his youth as the Muggle brat Dudley Dursley in the “Harry Potter” franchise, Melling is only just now getting to show off that talent in the funny-kinky “Pillion,” which puts him on his knees beaming up at Alexander Skarsgård’s 6-foot-4 biker as though this blond hunk was the sun. His Colin, a shy gay man who sings the high notes in a barbershop quartet, is so visibly infatuated licking Skarsgård’s leather boots in a dark alley that you believe he lusts for humiliation. Colin has only just discovered that fact about himself. He’s yet to even learn this man’s name. (It’s Ray.)
Perhaps you’d like to be taken to dinner first, but “Pillion” is about Colin’s needs — specifically his need to please — and first-time feature filmmaker Harry Lighton challenges us to root for his bliss. This fetishy adventure is a minimalist romantic comedy in which submissive meets dominant, and submissive explores his physical and emotional vulnerabilities. Marriage and a baby carriage are off the table; the journey matters, not the destination.
“Pillion” is what motorcyclists call the passenger seat, at least in suburban England where this is set. It’s a passive position compared to the driver, but still a cooler upgrade from where Colin starts the movie riding in: the rear of a sedan. Out the car’s back window, he sees Ray zoom by in white Stormtrooper-looking gear and, by happenstance, bumps into him that night at a pub where Colin’s mother, Peggy (Lesley Sharp), has set up a blind date with a nice bloke. That guy gets forgotten the instant Ray slips Colin a note with a time and place to meet.
Peggy isn’t panicked by her son’s alpha-male predilections. “I think a biker sounds exciting,” she says with a grin. His father, Pete (Douglas Hodge), just wants him to wear a helmet. Neither parent is privy to the fact that Ray simply isn’t very nice. Ray controls the gobsmacked Colin quietly, calculating the bare minimum of kindness required to have a house boy willing to cook dinner, tend to his Rottweiler and sleep on the floor. He withholds his approval to keep the paler, smaller man anxious.
That Rottweiler contended for the Palm Dog at last year’s Cannes, a prize for the festival’s best canine. Frankly, Melling himself should have won. His performance is pure puppy, from the way he silently studies Ray’s silent cues to the eagerness with which he leaps up to fetch Ray a beer. When Ray lavishes attention on another biker’s pet pillion, Kevin (Jake Shears of the Scissor Sisters), Colin sulks until his master unzips his trousers and gives him a treat.
Flexing his abs in shiny Motoralls, Skarsgård uses his own appeal to expose an unattractive wrinkle in human behavior: Ray is so gorgeous that everyone just takes it as fact that Colin is lucky to be near him. When a coworker asks this scrawny geek how he bagged a hunk like Ray, Colin brags that he has “an aptitude for devotion,” which includes wearing a padlock around his neck and shaving his Byronesque curls so that he looks like a zealot — which in a way, he is.
Over and over, Colin takes stock of his own debasement. But then he looks at his model-handsome lover and calculates that his suffering is worth it. He’s good at compartmentalizing; he’s a parking violations attendant who tickets angry people all day. When he needs an excuse to cry, he finds one (and it hurts to watch).
Lately, it’s been a thrill to see queer stories confidently leapfrog over coming-out narratives to the trickier question of whether two individuals in particular are a decent match. Lighton leaps further than that — he goes full Evel Knievel by daring to ask how we feel about a relationship that’s indecent, but still has worth as a set of training wheels for a wobbly young man learning what he wants.
It’s a more optimistic take on Colin and Ray’s coupledom than was in the book that inspired the script, Adam Mars-Jones’ 2020 novella “Box Hill,” which was subtitled “A Story of Low Self-Esteem.” A study of the psychology of abuse, that story’s more brainwashed version of Colin finds him decades older looking back on the affair and pining for a relationship that reads as horrible between the lines.
Lighton isn’t oblivious to the power imbalance, but he’s made a movie about going forward, not being stuck. He trusts his naif with more agency, and so “Pillion” is freer to play its insults for laughs. You’ll giggle a lot. That gleam in Melling’s eyes makes it feel like a comic fantasy, although who knows? Perhaps there really are BDSM biker gangs hosting afternoon picnics with serving boys tied spread-eagled on a buffet table. That bucolic scene is filmed in a slow pivot around the park, cinematographer Nick Morris getting a chuckle from how the image shifts from Georges Seurat to “Hellraiser.”
Eventually, Colin’s parents will be more flinchy about his new boyfriend, leading to a beat or two that don’t land with the impact they could. Oddly, Lighton might be too restrained himself. Like his leads, he prefers to say everything with a look.
But while Melling is always endearingly open and responsive, Skarsgård stays unreadable. His Ray always seems to be hiding behind a motorcycle visor even when he’s not and when he deigns to speak, the words trail off in a huff of exhaustion. The only thing we know about Ray’s life are the names of his two previous dogs, and that’s only because he has them tattooed on his chest.
Any more personal facts about Ray — his own job or family or romantic history, even his favorite movie — would risk us clinging onto it too tightly as an explanation of what he gets out of this himself. Serving Ray’s pleasure is Colin’s focus. And our focus is on Colin’s pursuit of that.
Yet with subtle skill, Skarsgård reveals that Ray is thinking about Colin more than he’s willing to let on. Curiosity flickers across his face when his submissive surprises him. He stays gruff, of course, but you sense that Ray is as manacled by his authoritarian role as Colin literally is in his hungry, slurping devotion to his master. Puny and pathetic as Colin appears, he begins to seem like the braver of the two. It takes courage to map your own boundaries — then to cross over that line and get hurt, and get back up and out there. Lighton’s biker BDSM rom-com might sound niche, but free yourself to see it and you’ll discover it’s a universal romance.
‘Pillion’
Not rated
Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes
Playing: Opens Friday, Feb. 6 in limited release
