FILM REVIEW
– CHOKE (2008)
Brilliant sex-comedy, with touches of tragedy and pathos, and a glorious sense of irreverence.
Directed by Clark Gregg, it stars Sam Rockwell, as a sexaholic, who is undergoing therapy for his addictions. He tends to seduce women to have sex with hem until he feels empty inside, as an act of catharsis.
Working in a US living history village, as a pre-War Of Independence settler, but the money is poor, and his Mother, (Angelica Huston in Oscar worthy mode) is dying of Alzheimer’s in a hospital, and he needs to pay the bills. To gain more money and gain sympathy, he has taken to throwing fake choking fits in restaurants.
He meets a nurse, Kelly MacDonald, while visiting his Mum, and develops a relationship with her. She reveals that his Mum has a diary, but that it was written in Italian, which she can translate. The diary presents a preposterous theory that Victor (Rockwell’s character), was conceived through the foreskin of Christ, which his mum had stolen from the Vatican, making Victor the Second Coming, and the possible source of his mum’s salvation. Rumour gets around the nursing home about this, and Victor becomes the subject of a Life Of Brian style cult among the hopeful patients. He realizes that the nurse character seems to believe this too, and he even begins to believe it himself at times when his feelings become sufficiently desperate.
However, he son discovers that his girlfriend, the one woman with who he cannot gain an erection or find a sense of emptiness, is not a nurse at all, but a patient, who has taken to wearing a nurse’s uniform. The Italian diary is in fact her creation, not his mother’s. The stories she tells are all made up.
Flashback memories s takes Victor back to happier days with his Mother, when she was a fugitive animal rights activist, dragging him along on her expeditions to liberate dangerous animals from zoos. Victor’s first choking fit had been a desperate cry for attention to her when he’d discovered his picture on a missing child ad on a milk carton. He later finds out that his Mum is not his Mum at all, but that she’d stolen him randomly years before. He learns this from his Mum as he feeds her when she becomes lucid for a short time as he feeds her chocolate, but he overdoes it and chokes her to death on the produce. He and his non-nurse girlfriend flee, and the FBI eventually arrests Victor. During his interrogation, he excretes an anal toy that he had trapped in his guts during an earlier sexual tryst, and once set free, he sets off for more irreverent sex adventures.
Funny, and highly irreverent at every turn – a classic.
LINKS
The official website – http://www.foxsearchlight.com/choke/
CHOKE on The International Movie Database http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1024715/
CHOKE on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choke_(film)
Arthur Chappell
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