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A warning, this episode contains discussion of sex and kink.
Folks have been talking about the gay BDSM biker movie since it premiered at Cannes last year.
Well, it's finally here.
In Pillian a meek young man named Colin meets a handsome broody biker who brings out his submissive side.
The biker is played by Alexander Skarsgård, so I mean...
You get it.
They enter into a sub-dom relationship, but the biker remains so mysterious and withholding that Colin starts to want more endangering the bond the two men share.
I'm Glenn Weldon, and today we're talking about Pillion on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
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Joining me today is NPR film critic Bob Mondello.
Hey, Bob.
You will call me sir.
Zipping right past that.
Also joining us is freelance music and culture journalist Rihanna Cruz.
Hey, Rihanna.
Hey, Glenn.
Thank you for not making me uncomfortable.
Of course.
In Pillion, timid 30-something Colin still lives with his parents.
He's played by Harry Melling.
One night in a pub, he meets Ray, an unnervingly hot biker.
That's Alexander Skarsgård, of course.
Ray ushers Colin into the world of kink, specifically that of sub-dom culture.
Colin joins Ray's biker gang, has a few orgies and introduces Ray to his parents, both of whom love and support their gay son but reject the nature of the relationship he's found with Ray.
Can what Colin shares with Ray survive?
Does Ray even want it to?
Pillion is in theaters now.
And by the way, Pillion, it turns out, means the passenger seat on a motorcycle.
I didn't know that.
I kept thinking it was one of their last names.
Nice. specifically words that make a great bingo and scrabble.
So now, you know, pillion is the passenger seat on a motorcycle that bugged me.
So let's get to it.
Rihanna, this is a conversation that's going to be tough to keep NPR friendly, but let's try.
What'd you make of pillion?
I just want to say pillion was my favorite movie that I watched over the past 12 months.
I am a really big fan of it.
It's a rom-com.
It's a coming of age movie, which are things that you wouldn't necessarily peg to, like bdsm, biker story sure, but i think it works really well tonally and i i think there's two separate elements of pillion that work incredibly alongside each other.
One is the characterization.
I think both the actors scars, guard and melling, do so much work that they show, not tell.
I think Skarsgård does the impossible, which is like portray someone so stoic as a dom and intentionally standoffish as like soft, you know.
And there's multiple layers to his character.
There's like shells there, you know like a jawbreaker, where it's like hard, and then you kind of like break through it slowly and slowly over the course of the movie and harry milling has this beautiful, expressive face with these big, beautiful eyes, and there's a moment where, like i believe it's like a third of the way into the movie, where you know he shaves his head and like goes full submissive and like it's a characterization that really took me aback.
That and the script, i think, are both incredible.
It made me laugh, it made me cry.
What more is there to say?
I love pillion.
There you go.
Well, I don't know, Bob.
What more is there to say about Pilling?
You tell me.
Well, first of all, it's not a rom-com.
It's a dom-com.
And second of all, you're right on all of that.
The film is surprising in so many ways.
I had no idea where it was going from the very start.
I found myself really engaged by the characters.
Harry Melling is very appealing.
Am I correct that he used to be in Harry Potter?
Yes, you are.
Yeah.
He's a wonderful character, a very endearing character.
And then I found myself sort of finding Skarsgård appealing too.
And that surprised me because he's a cold character, at least in everything he's trying to be.
And I think ends up being more complicated than that, which I thought was almost refreshing.
This picture went places I wasn't expecting.
I found myself much more engaged than I thought I was going to be.
I fought it for about a minute and a half and then stopped.
I'm going to be the outlier here.
I liked this movie in retrospect.
I liked having watched it.
But for most of its running time...
It felt very basic, very normcore, very sub-dom 101.
And that's not really the movie's fault.
That's a function of drama, right?
Of this film feeling like we must introduce this world to the audience.
And our audience surrogate the point of view character is someone who, despite being gay, has grown up in a very basic normcore world with these heteronormative sensibilities.
That's the lens we're viewing this world through.
And that really colored how the story got told.
And also because when you dramatize something, there is a plan, a shape, a schematic we all have to follow.
And I don't blame the movie for this.
I blame Aeschylus and Euripides and Sophocles.
Because at the end of the day, Guy discovers Kink, has a great time.
That's not a story, right?
That's not drama.
That is an eight-minute video clip that I'm told one can find online.
I have a very good authority.
So instead we get this movie, which is guy discovers kink, sort of enjoys it, but then quickly, very quickly, too quickly, becomes convinced that what he really wants is is this vanilla relationship stuff his parents have and what his parents want for him.
And that is, I get, again, that's a dramatic story beat.
You get what you think you want and then you want more.
That's how drama works, but that is not, and this is my issue, that's not how kinks work.
Someone doesn't discover a kink and feel unfulfilled by it.
By definition, the kink satisfies them in a way vanilla stuff doesn't, or else they wouldn't do it.
So it felt like...
This movie never really committed to showing us Colin, who was happy, who was turned on, who was exactly where he wanted to be, even in the orgy scenes, which should be fun.
I felt this primness, this judgment, this kind of quality of, well...
Yes, he might be having fun, but of course he's unfulfilled.
And that is such a boring norm core attitude toward this stuff.
And it's complicated.
I get it because that's the character's attitude toward this, right?
Because of how he grew up.
I am fighting you on this.
And let me tell you why.
Colin goes from one domineering relationship to another.
His mother is in control of his life in ways that are pretty obvious in the scenes where he's with his family.
And this is an alternative to that.
So he sort of knows what he's going into.
I thought this was a transference from one situation where he's submissive to someone to another situation where he's being submissive and that he wants the things that he's been used to.
Didn't really surprise me in that respect, but anyway, that would be my take.
I also think that like part of what makes the movie so good to me is that it doesn't really feel to me like dom sub 101 or kink 101.
Collins wants and needs are more nuanced than like he's unfulfilled in the kink world, because I think the big transition in his character happens when his mom dies.
And that kind of like flips his perspective, you know, and he kind of starts reconsidering everything after that happens, which goes back to Bob's point about the domineering relationships in his life.
But I think that like, it's not necessarily that he is unfulfilled the entire time.
I think he has a wide scale shifting of the self and a lot of self doubt that creeps in.
I don't know.
I don't necessarily think that's a constant throughout the entire movie.
I think it's a distinct character shift.
I didn't pick up on that.
I'm open to the fact that you're right.
I agree with you both that the tension with his parents was to me the newest thing, the most interesting thing in the movie.
Yes, it felt a little anachronistic because I think this is a holdover from the book, the book Box Hill by Adam Mars Jones.
In the book, it's a guy remembering a relationship he had in the 1970s.
In the film, they brought it into modern times.
But that feeling, I mean it is touching on something real, like that feeling his parents have, which is we want you happy forever, but only if we can recognize and approve of this relationship, because it's something we recognize.
If we widen out, that's a real tension within the queer community, right?
Because there is this feeling of what gay men of a certain age, and Bob, you and I are in that box.
I'm putting us both in that same box.
How gay men of a certain age envision the world for themselves is different from how younger queer folk envision what they want and expect and demand from the world, in spite of the world, because they should.
They should demand more.
It should be on their own terms.
The film is grappling with that in those scenes with the parents, and I really appreciate that.
But I keep going back to this.
In the book, the Colin Ray relationship goes on for six years.
In the movie, it's several months.
Now I can buy a kink.
This world starting to pall lose its juice over six years, not over a handful of months.
The whole world of this film should feel new and exciting to Colin.
And if the movie was doing more work of placing us inside his head, I think we'd feel that joy, that feeling of I've found this thing more deeply.
But the reason we don't is because of this movie's point of view, because it's going through Colin.
Now wait, you're saying that over the course of months he wouldn't get bored with something that he's never been involved in before and that he hadn't considered before the relationship started.
He's just going to leap in with both feet and be entirely, I'm sorry, I don't buy your premise here.
I'm saying the film doesn't show us him actually enjoying it.
The film shows us having qualms because it's dealing in repression, right?
It's dealing with where he comes from.
This film is not interested in the release, the at last I found this in the joy.
It's interested in repression because it's British and repression is their national identity.
And that's where the comedy of the film comes in.
And yeah, that's kind of what I'm saying, Bob.
All right.
Well, I won't fight you on it.
Again, I think what I found intriguing about the characters not so much the film itself but the characters is that I think they're malleable.
And I think you even see that in Ray.
There are moments where you can see doubt in his eyes.
And I think that's really instructive.
And it speaks to what Colin is saying. trying to achieve in the relationship too.
I think it's an interesting character study of these two guys and also of their relationships with the world.
And Collins is the more compelling of the two stories.
Colin wants to set boundaries.
Colin wants to have a relationship, but he also wants to have a sense of self.
And he doesn't realize that at first.
And he realizes it as the movie goes on.
And he becomes more interesting as a result of that.
And I think the thing about the way the film works is that once he asserts himself, it becomes an interesting power dynamic right.
That there's something going on there.
He needs to assert himself with his mother as well, right?
He doesn't have to with his father.
His father's sort of on his team.
And I thought the dynamic of those characters and how he was negotiating the family dynamic and the love dynamic were really interesting and really compelling.
And that's what kept me going in the movie.
I think they're very lived in and I think they're very real.
And I think the thing that I keep coming back to with this movie is how genuinely and brilliantly queer it feels like it's a queer movie.
And I think like, There's a lot of content these days that is gay but not queer.
And I think there's defined distinction between the two.
Looking at you, heated rivalry.
And I think we need things like pillion, because I feel like they're more authentic than the alternative.
They're more authentic to the community, to the kink community and things like that.
And to your point, Glenn, I don't know.
I feel like maybe I'm speaking for myself here, but I've had fiery relationships over the course of three months that have burned and fizzled out.
And I think there's something so queer about that that the fact that it happens only over the course of several months where he is introduced to this world, it envelops him.
And I don't know.
It feels real to me.
And it feels like a real coming-of-age movie.
And maybe it's because I'm young.
I'm in the community.
I see people around me go through this.
It felt like Colin was a friend of mine that I was watching on this journey.
And I think that's part of what makes this movie so special.
Okay.
I'll take that.
I know there is a more explicit version of this film.
The directors talked about it, and maybe that would have addressed some of my concerns.
But the team also said they thought a more explicit cut would make audiences laugh.
And that's where I disagree with you, Rhianna, because they don't mean audiences would have laughed.
They mean straight audiences would have laughed, which made me think who cares what straight audiences think?
And then I thought, oh, no, no, no, it's this film.
This film does.
And when I read that, I was also taken aback because...
Isn't that what you want given this subject?
People laugh when they're uncomfortable.
This is a film about someone stepping outside of the group, his familiar vanilla world, into an uncomfortable place.
So let people laugh.
And I mean, also, not for nothing.
Have you seen how these guys dress?
It should be fun.
It should be funny.
I mean, the guys in Tom of Finland drawings aren't scowling and taking themselves super seriously.
Those guys are beaming.
They're grinning because they're having a great time.
And this film wasn't interested in having a great time.
This film was interested in what would happen to this guy if he found himself in this place.
And that's a journey that you guys were prepared to go on, that I just felt I was less willing to go on that particular journey.
Well, I feel like Glenn.
I want to push back on that though, as well, because I feel like the idea that they don't want people to laugh at this movie kind of reflects a sensitivity that's at the heart of the movie, right.
I think the sensitivity to these characters, to the story, to the relationships, is what makes this movie great.
And I think that's why it connects with these audiences, these queer gay audiences.
And I think that couching right of like well, we didn't want to show more stuff because people would laugh, is more of a protection, I think, for the And for the content shown and the sensitivity that's portrayed.
Then it is like well, you know, we I don't know don't want to get straight audiences confused.
Or upset or uncomfortable.
Well, what they don't want people to laugh at is not the movie, but the kink.
They want not to mock the people that this film is about.
I read some interviews with the director where he said that he involved a lot of people from the community biker community and that what he discovered, riding around with them on the backs of their bikes, on the pillions I guess, am I using that correctly was that this was not all about sex, that this was about a sense of community, a group of men having fun, that it wasn't just about
When you look at somebody in harnesses and leather and studs it looks a little dangerous if you're looking from outside.
That that is more about performing something that is fun.
And it is less about sex.
And that he didn't want to misdirect an audience in that way.
So that if the audience had been laughing at the kink...
That that would be misrepresenting what the community that he was showing was all about.
That's an interesting point.
I mean yes, I do think the film could have found some fun without turning it into.
Let's laugh at these people.
And I don't think it did for me.
But here's the thing about film.
Reasonable people can disagree.
I think we're reasonably disagreeing.
But now it's your turn.
What do you think?
We want to know what you think about Pillion.
Find us on Facebook at facebook.com slash pchh on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com slash nprpopculture.
We'll have a link in our episode description.
That brings us to the end of our show.
Rhianna Cruz, Bob Mandello, thank you for being here.
Great conversation.
This was great fun.
Thanks for having us.
I could hear the two of you argue all day.
And just a reminder that signing up for Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus is a great way to support our show and public radio, and you get to listen to all of our episodes sponsor-free.
So please go find out more at plus.npr.org or visit the link in our show notes.
This episode was produced by Carly Rubin, Liz Metzger and Mike Katziff and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy, and a locum in provides our theme music.
Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
I'm Glenn Weldon, and we'll see you all next time.
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