Harry Potter Star Harry Melling And Alexander Skarsgård's 'Kinky' Biker Romance Causes A Huge Stir In Cannes
Former Harry Potter star Harry Melling and fellow actor Alexander Skarsgård certainly raised eyebrows last year when the details of their new film were first revealed.
Harry and Alexander co-star in the new Harry Lighton movie Pillion, which centres around a BDSM-centric queer romance.
In the film, Harry plays a timid man who is seduced by the leader of a biker gang, and becomes his submissive, having his eyes opened to a whole new subculture he previously knew nothing about.
Pillion had its premiere over the weekend at the Cannes Film Festival, where it received a standing ovation for eight whole minutes, and promptly became one of the event’s most talked-about offerings.
The film has already received the thumbs up from critics, too.
Vanity Fair has hailed it as “a frank, kinky, utterly idiosyncratic first feature from Lighton”, while Deadline praised the “beautifully heartbreaking love story” set “against a modern world of BDSM”.
The Daily Beast described Pillion as “quite possibly the sexiest movie at Cannes this year, that’s also delightfully tender”, while The Guardian’s four-review said: “Here to prove there’s nothing gentle about true love is an intensely English story of romance, devotion and loss from first-time feature director Harry Lighton, who has created something funny and touching and alarming.”
An official synopsis for the film previously teased: “Colin, a weedy wallflower is letting life pass him by. That is until Ray, the impossibly handsome leader of a motorbike club, takes him on as his submissive.
“Ray uproots Colin from his dreary suburban life, introducing him to a community of kinky, queer bikers and taking all sorts of virginities along the way. But as Colin steps deeper into Ray’s world of rules and mysteries, he begins to question whether the life of a 24/7 submissive is for him. Has he found his calling, or simply swapped one form of suffocation for another?”
Meanwhile, later in Cannes, it looked like Alexander had taken inspiration from his character, sporting some knee-high Saint-Laurent boots on the red carpet...