(courtesy IMDb)
How do you define romance?
The odds, whether you are straight or gay, or some other gloriously diverse point outside of that binary, is that you will think of tender touches, of deep friendship and shared values, of physical love and whispered words of love; you know, the kind of stuff off which most romantic comedies are made.
But Pillion, written and directed by Harry Lighton, the story based on the book Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones, is not your usual romcom and in fact, it seems to glory in defying any and all of those preconceived notions of what a romantic relationship is.
In this world, where master-servant relationships dominate and BDSM is the prevailing kinky ethos, very little of what we define as romance is immediately obvious.
And that’s the key idea here; Pillion approaches romance almost from the side, or perhaps more aptly the back, its story absolutely intimately romantic but not obviously so, although it is clear from the get-go that one party is more inclined to some of the standard trappings of romance than the other.
Colin (Harry Melling) is a shy, introverted gay man who lives in Bromley, London with his loving parents – their relationship is, deliberately or not, portrayed as the standard ideal of a romantic relationship, throwing that of Colin’s relationship with aggressively taciturn biker Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) into brutally sharp relief – his life defined by a listless job as a parking infringement officer and barbershop quartet singing with his father.
Colin’s mother Peggy (Lesley Sharp) is dying of cancer and while Colin’s dad Pete (Douglas Hodge) and his mum do their best to act as if it’s business as usual, almost overplaying standard markers of familial togetherness like Christmas Day to an inadvertently exaggerated degree, it’s clear there’s a suffocating sense of grief-laden doom in the house and that Colin, already trapped in a very small “l” life is needing some sort of release and relief from all the simmering emotional stress.
He accidentally finds it in Ray, a biker with a local gay biker gang, who picks up Colin on Christmas Eve at a pub, initiating him into a BDSM relationship where Colin effectively acts at Ray’s beck and call, domestically, relationally and s*xually.
To those not intimately familiar with that scene, it seems quite confronting, with Colin forced, among other things, to sleep on the floor and stand up in the loungeroom when the men are reading at night, the relationship between the two men displaying none of the usual markers of a romantic relationship.
Colin seems happy with this, even if his parents begin to have serious misgivings about Ray who appears, and in fact does if we’re honest, treat Colin with a callous disregard, until an emotionally devastating events shakes Colin to the core and leads to a serious reckoning in the men’s relationship.
While some reviews have hailed Pillion as a grandly romantic movie – see the poster above – and there are some moments where Ray does exhibit some actual tenderness (albeit belatedly and under great duress), the truth is that the film is not really a romcom at all.
Not in the traditional sense anyway, and not simply because it is set in a niche LGBTQI world where the usual rules of romance simply don’t apply (although those in that scene aren’t as hyperbolically nasty as Ray with many doms making it clear that love their subs and people shouldn’t interpret their roleplaying as some of loveless punishment).
Rather Pillion is a movie about one man’s self discovery about who he is and what he wants, with the Colin who emerges from this emotionally intense and grittily nuanced story not the same Colin we meet in the initial pub scene.
After some fairly traumatic experiences where Colin is driven to the point of breakdown, he begins to understand that while he enjoys being obedient to a dominant personality, and gets a real charge from it, he also wants some of the trappings of a regular romance.
Pillion then becomes a story of one man’s gay coming of age as he dives into a scene that attracts him and discovers through some fairly significant and emotionally wrenching trial and error what it is he wants from life and from a partner.
Much of this is triggered by Ray’s behaviour which it becomes increasingly clear does not come from an emotionally healthy place; in fact, you have to agree with Peggy when, having a much-requested Sunday roast lunch with Colin and Ray, she accuses Colin’s boyfriend of being a fairly nasty piece of work.
And honestly, you can’t help but agree.
Whether you embrace the idea of a BDSM relationship or not, and obviously not everyone does, there is, of course, real pleasure and fulfillment for those who are in that particular scene.
But regardless of the merits of that particular lifestyle, the reality is that Ray is not a healthy individual, his severe emotional limitations and almost narcissistic cruelty thrown into vivid relief by the relationships of the other bikers who participate in many of the same activities as Ray and Colin but who also kiss and demonstrate real tenderness and affection, something Ray is clearly absolutely unable to do, except when pressed by Colin.
The movie is then less of a popularity vote on the lifestyle and more of an exploration of how an emotionally damaged person takes refuge in the lifestyle to make up for his own manifestly dark emotional limitations.
Colin does love Ray, and you have to assume Ray loves Colin in his own broken, heavily circumscribed way, but in the end Pillion is not a grand and epic romance; it is more about how finding your way to love, true love is often a huge learning curve, one marked by misfires and poor choices, and the emotional growth that results, and that at the hands of one person’s toxic brokenness, that you can learn and grow and discover who you as a person, all of which can propel into the actual romantic future you want and need.