Ajay Naidu, Heather Burns

While not playing an aggro, proto-gay desi with a grudge against Santa Claus, Ajay Naidu has been dating the same beauty since high school, his fiancée Heather Burns. In the black comedy Choke, Burns’ yuppie control freak hires small-time con man Sam Rockwell to mock-rape her as part of a sexual fantasy. Her instructions are so specific and go so far beyond Meg Ryan’s neurotic deli order in When Harry Met Sally that Rockwell loses it. He aims his emissions at her expensive sheets and scampers out the window purely out of spite.

It’s just one fucked-up scene in a very, very funny movie about a man who earns a living by faking choking accidents in restaurants and collecting checks from his would-be saviors. He spends the money on a nursing home for his mother (Anjelica Huston), who’s afflicted with Alzheimer’s and most of the time has no idea who he is. Rockwell supports himself as an actor in a colonial America theme park. His nemesis is a supervisor who stays in character even off the clock. (Funniest line: an argument in old-time English ends with, ‘Fucking knave!’) His best friend is a compulsive master of his domain. The two attend sex addiction self-help groups, where Rockwell picks up slutty junkies for meaningless rutting in the bathroom. He’s doing it for his own sanity: for a few seconds, orgasm blots out his pain.

The novel Choke was written by Chuck Palahniuk, the transgressive fiction author who previously wrote Fight Club. Like the Fight Club movie, Choke is filthy and dark and throws in an enormous mind-fuck at the end. Unlike Fight Club, it’s consistently hilarious and non-nihilist. As dark as the comedy is, it has a strongly moralist undercurrent.

The director films some scenes purely as stunts to push the R-rated envelope. But he does so with such obvious enthusiasm that you never take it seriously. Miming the removal of a sex toy? Sure, see what you can get away with.

After Palahniuk became successful as a novelist, his dad fell victim to a horrific real-life crime:

… his father, Fred Palahniuk, had started dating a woman… whom he had met through a personal ad… Fontaine’s ex-boyfriend… followed Fontaine and the senior Palahniuk to Fontaine’s home… shot them both and dragged their bodies into Fontaine’s cabin home, which he set on fire… [Wiki]

The trailer: