After a brief separation dedicated to soul-searching, Eliza Doolittle returns to Professor Henry Higgins’ house. He greets her with a singular question that encapsulates the nature of their relationship—“Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?” The 1964 film, My Fair Lady, abruptly ends there. In some versions of the staged musical, the cockney flower girl throws the bloomin’ slippers at him. The regressive ending of the movie begs the question: Why does she return to such a domineering man when Freddy, a handsome young stud, is waiting for her on the street where she lives?
Ah, the vicissitudes of love and its attendant dependencies. Eliza’s rebellious attempt to break free of her professor is short-lived. Without the rigid schedule and structure Higgins provides, she is adrift, displaced from her economic class of origin and not yet settled into a new one. On the surface, writer and director Harry Lighton’s Pillion is dressed up in an entirely different wardrobe. One that involves leather biker wear and BDSM accessories.
Without the wearying sight of hairy white buttocks routinely on display, the protagonists of Lighton’s movie are merely a century ahead in time. Their psychological make-up is essentially the same as their cinematic forefathers. Or fore-daddies in this case.
Lighton skillfully introduces Colin (Harry Melling) with a wintry portrait of his personal and professional life. He works as a traffic warden by day, absorbing the ire of automobile owners in a parking garage. At night, he sings in a barbershop quartet with his father and older brother, complete with striped suits and straw hats. During his off hours, Colin eats meals with his family, walks the family dog and sits in his room. He is a recessive figure without a uniform or wardrobe of his own to declare an identity to the broader world.
Until Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) appears at the pub one night where Colin sings. Melling’s voice is as pure and rich as a boy soloing in the chorus of a Catholic mass. After the performance Ray approaches him and sets the terms of their first encounter. It doesn’t dawn on Colin that he’s been hemmed in and infantilized by his humdrum routines. When he unzips Ray’s leather onesie, Colin’s transformation into a sexually liberated gay man begins. Melling’s sense of excitement is palpable. It looks like Colin’s having fun for the first time in his life.
But his lack of experience makes for an awkward alleyway tryst. From the outset, Ray is consistently withholding. Skarsgård inhabits the character with a defensive posture. Instead of endowing Ray with an inner life, he leads with the sharp edges of his taut physical beauty. When Ray reads chapters of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle in bed at night, the novel’s content might suggest what his inner turmoil is all about. But the damage registers in his silence and not in the script. Skarsgård undercuts his onscreen presence as the ultimate object of desire by discarding Ray’s soul. He’s an impenetrable alpha male whose only need for connection is physical.
For this dom-and-sub lust story to have a hope of lasting beyond one fumbling blowjob, Colin adopts the trappings of Ray’s subculture. Because he’s used to playing by his family’s rules, as lax and loving as those are, obeying Ray’s commands isn’t much of a change. Like Eliza and Sandy in Grease, to belong to his new sexual partner’s stratum in society he must change his appearance. Colin’s crown of charming messy curls is the first thing to go. They reflect an inner softness that’s banished from Ray’s hardcore social life. Post-punk jeans, t-shirts, and a lock and circle of chains around his pale neck all are replacements for his normcore gear.
Pillion treads lightly around the subject of class. Without mentioning Ray’s profession, his economic status provides him with the freedom to move about the world as he pleases. That’s just as attractive to Colin—and Eliza—as the package itself. But after Higgins sings to himself, “I’ve grown accustomed to her face,” Eliza returns to him because she knows he adores her. When Colin finally asserts his own identity, fueled by his own separate and individual desires, Ray, a cocksure Narcissus, isn’t equipped to respond. He’s grown accustomed to his own pretty face staring back at himself in the mirror.
‘Pillion’ is now playing at AMC Kabuki 8 and Alamo Cinema Drafthouse New Mission.
