What do sadomasochism and Satie have in common?

Rarely does music seem so far removed from the images it accompanies and, at the same time, so inevitable for them. This is the feeling that the Gymnopédie No. 1 by Erik Satie to the movie Pillion, interpreted with errors, inaccuracies, and out of time by the biker dominates and protagonist of the film, Ray (actor Alexander Skarsgård), when he is overheard by the other protagonist, the submissive, Col (Harry Melling). Harry Lighton has made a film that shows a masochistic relationship from an angle we are not accustomed to. He could have opted for a dense, unsettling, or explicitly sexual soundtrack. Instead, he chooses one of the most restrained and silent works in music history. The decision is not accidental. Satie does not accompany the narrative, but transforms it.In ancient Greece, the gymnopédies were ritual festivals of naked youths, celebrated mainly in Sparta in honor of Apollo and in representation of discipline, beauty, strength, and harmony between body and spirit. More than a celebration of nudity, the body was conceived as a space for moral formation and collective cohesion. In Pillion, available on Filmin, homoeroticism is conveyed through the codes of BDSM relationships, and although they may seem totally removed from any harmony, from any moral formation, this is not the case.

When Erik Satie composed the three Gymnopédies in 1888, he did not intend to reconstruct this Greek tradition, but rather to evoke its spirit from a Symbolist sensibility. He opted for slowness, repetition, simplicity, and an atmosphere of temporal suspension that invites one to flee from time and explore a new reality. Precisely for this reason, its presence in Pillion is so significant, because it turns the BDSM relationship into a ritual in which the music does not accentuate violence or eroticism, but rather shifts the attention towards consent, vulnerability, trust, admiration, and contempt. The performance of the piece on a Clavinova at Ray's house and the synthesizer version created by the composer of the musical soundtrack, Oliver Coates, when they ride motorcycles, make us escape from the reality to which we are accustomed, because they deactivate any temptation of morbidity, because they force the viewer to look in a different way, to listen in a different way, and to try to understand that when between two people there is a "degrading and sickly" convention, as described by the majority, perhaps it is necessary to understand more the psychological complexities that are nourished by a light that is mostly understood as darkness.It is here that Pillion acquires a philosophical dimension in which submission does not appear as an annulment of the subject, but as a particular way of constructing it. Gilles Deleuze argued that masochism is not the opposite of sadism, but a proper structure based on ritual, contract, and waiting. The film seems to capture this intuition, as power is not only imposition, but also a form of communication deeply encoded from the angle of an inhospitable and cruel sensibility, in Lighton's case.The contrast between the musical delicacy (and that of many of the images) and the apparent harshness of BDSM practices is what makes the film so powerful. Far from judging or exoticizing them, it places them within a world of undeniable human complexity. For some people, within a fully consensual relationship based on trust, pain and humiliation can cease to be negative experiences and become forms of pleasure and even sublimity. Not because suffering has value in itself, but because it is re-signified within a shared ritual in which the body, desire, and vulnerability acquire new meaning. And in which the sublimity of the body is voluntarily exposed to its own limits. Pain ceases to be just a physical sensation and becomes an experience of transformation and a temporary suspension of daily hierarchies that allows for the exploration of different forms of identity, of relationship with the other, and of a chained freedom. Even if it is difficult to understand.Pillion, with this amalgam of opposing sentiments, forces the viewer to abandon prejudices. What emerges is not a story about power, but about human fragility, about the need to be seen, accepted, and loved even though the path is degradation and denigration.Perhaps this is the great lesson of Pillion: understanding the possibility of leaving ourselves behind during the 106 minutes the film lasts. Pain ceases to be just pain, submission ceases to be just submission, and silence ceases to be just silence, because it becomes the place where intimacy can manifest itself with all its depth. Satie's music does not explain the film, but it creates a framework where the imperfection of the execution by Ray and the listening by Col take a back seat and where the sensitivity of the notes, even if played badly, makes comprehensible human relationships to which we are not accustomed but which are part of this world, however hard it may be to believe at times.