My Fair Lad(y) meets BDSM

"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."

"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."

"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."

Eliza Doolittle briefly seeks independence but returns to Professor Higgins, highlighting dependence created by class displacement and loss of structure. Harry Lighton's Pillion reimagines that dynamic in a leather-biker and BDSM aesthetic, making its protagonists a century removed yet psychologically similar to their predecessors. Lighton introduces Colin as a wintry, recessive figure: a daytime traffic warden who absorbs motorists' ire, a nighttime barbershop quartet singer with family, and a man who eats with his family, walks the dog, and sits alone in his room. Ray's arrival at the pub where Colin sings initiates a new disruptive force, while Melling's voice is noted as pure and rich.

Read at East Bay Express | Oakland, Berkeley & Alameda