Choking Man
Written & Directed by Steve
In Steve Barron’s Choking Man, an ultra-low budget production about urban alienation and immigrant despair, griminess is a form of solace. As the soft-spoken protagonist, an Ecuadorian kitchen worker named Jorge (Octavio Gómez), slowly wastes away washing dishes in a Queens diner, the leftovers from patrons’ plates dominate his field of vision and catalyze his daydreams. Barron uses bright yellow animations to represent Jorge’s avoidance of his mundane reality, a dreary world of brown and grey tones where his own presence never feels quite solid. Language and timidity are his primary foes. His vindication comes from abstractions.
While never achieving the full potential of its ethereal design, Choking Man has the guts to focus on an irritatingly distant character with enough nuances to turn him into an object of sympathy. Like an upright David Lynch movie, Barron’s story drifts between places both real and imagined, while faces and themes remain the only constants. Jorge lives in a decrepit apartment where the television always seems to be blaring and an imaginary roommate tries to make sense of his muddled thoughts. These mostly congeal into hostility: Unable to interact with his coworkers (his sole contact with society), he projects his frustration onto them.
Doling out his respective needs for affection and condescension to amicable waitress Amy (Eugenia Yuan) and snide kitchen colleague Jerry (Aaron Paul), Jorge falls into a self-made fantasy. His emotional journey unravels in Choking Man exclusively through symbolic visual cues: Discovering a rogue rabbit in the kitchen, he chases it outside and follows it under a fence before the trail goes cold. Deep inside his own rabbit hole, the outside world is cold and sterile.
Barron’s creative background suggests a commercial filmmaker going through his own process of discovery. A successful music video auteur and the director of studio hits like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Coneheads, he’s in virgin territory as the screenwriter of his latest project. It has the loose experimental feel of a first-time helmer mixed with the audacity to be entirely non-commercial. That doesn’t make Choking Man completely satisfactory—the plot grows repetitive after half an hour or so—but by immediately presenting itself as utterly unconventional, it builds an enthralling internal rhythm. The persistent lack of development forces viewers to pay attention with a heightened awareness that reflects Jorge’s pervasive gloominess.
For all its enticing dramatic hooks, Choking Man has a fairly unrewarding conclusion. Barron develops an anticipatory mood from the promise of redemption for his psychologically troubled leading man, and leaves out a much-needed final scene. Nevertheless, Jorge’s travails grow from meek and pathetic to devastating as the source of his turmoil becomes clarified. Barron has said he was inspired by the absorbing character study, The Station Agent, which stars Peter Dinklage as a little person with big issues. The influence shows through the director’s devout interest in an outsider’s exploits. Jorge’s background is so minimal that he barely exists, but that’s sort of the point.
Written & Directed by Steve
In Steve Barron’s Choking Man, an ultra-low budget production about urban alienation and immigrant despair, griminess is a form of solace. As the soft-spoken protagonist, an Ecuadorian kitchen worker named Jorge (Octavio Gómez), slowly wastes away washing dishes in a Queens diner, the leftovers from patrons’ plates dominate his field of vision and catalyze his daydreams. Barron uses bright yellow animations to represent Jorge’s avoidance of his mundane reality, a dreary world of brown and grey tones where his own presence never feels quite solid. Language and timidity are his primary foes. His vindication comes from abstractions.
While never achieving the full potential of its ethereal design, Choking Man has the guts to focus on an irritatingly distant character with enough nuances to turn him into an object of sympathy. Like an upright David Lynch movie, Barron’s story drifts between places both real and imagined, while faces and themes remain the only constants. Jorge lives in a decrepit apartment where the television always seems to be blaring and an imaginary roommate tries to make sense of his muddled thoughts. These mostly congeal into hostility: Unable to interact with his coworkers (his sole contact with society), he projects his frustration onto them.
Doling out his respective needs for affection and condescension to amicable waitress Amy (Eugenia Yuan) and snide kitchen colleague Jerry (Aaron Paul), Jorge falls into a self-made fantasy. His emotional journey unravels in Choking Man exclusively through symbolic visual cues: Discovering a rogue rabbit in the kitchen, he chases it outside and follows it under a fence before the trail goes cold. Deep inside his own rabbit hole, the outside world is cold and sterile.
Barron’s creative background suggests a commercial filmmaker going through his own process of discovery. A successful music video auteur and the director of studio hits like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Coneheads, he’s in virgin territory as the screenwriter of his latest project. It has the loose experimental feel of a first-time helmer mixed with the audacity to be entirely non-commercial. That doesn’t make Choking Man completely satisfactory—the plot grows repetitive after half an hour or so—but by immediately presenting itself as utterly unconventional, it builds an enthralling internal rhythm. The persistent lack of development forces viewers to pay attention with a heightened awareness that reflects Jorge’s pervasive gloominess.
For all its enticing dramatic hooks, Choking Man has a fairly unrewarding conclusion. Barron develops an anticipatory mood from the promise of redemption for his psychologically troubled leading man, and leaves out a much-needed final scene. Nevertheless, Jorge’s travails grow from meek and pathetic to devastating as the source of his turmoil becomes clarified. Barron has said he was inspired by the absorbing character study, The Station Agent, which stars Peter Dinklage as a little person with big issues. The influence shows through the director’s devout interest in an outsider’s exploits. Jorge’s background is so minimal that he barely exists, but that’s sort of the point.
