Movie review: 'Choking Man'

3 stars (out of four)

At times, writer-director Steve Barron presses his camera so closely into the face of “Choking Man” protagonist Jorge (Octavio Gomez Berrios) that it seems like he’s trying to push through the skin and burrow into the man’s head by force. Like the dim lighting of the diner kitchen where Jorge washes dishes, like the jangling score and like the film’s uncomfortable character dynamics, the approach is oppressive but effective.

Jorge, an Ecuadorian immigrant in Queens, is so agonizingly shy that Barron needs that kind of craft to get inside him. Since he can barely speak, the film communicates his inner life through gimmicks like the brief animated interludes that transform everyday items around him into dancing rabbits and ghostly devils. Those little vignettes have a playful yet dread-heavy whimsy reminiscent of the similar sequences in 2006’s “The Science of  Sleep” and this year’s “Eagle vs.  Shark.” But Barron puts the most emphasis on those claustrophobic close-ups of Jorge’s face, and of the Heimlich-maneuver how-to poster that hangs over his workstation. Like the choking victim on the poster, Barron implies, Jorge is strangling on something stuck inside him.

He’s particularly suffocated by his crush on Amy (Eugenia Yuan), a sweet Korean waitress who’s just joined the staff at Jorge’s diner. As kind as she is to him, he can’t help but freeze around her. Meanwhile, an obnoxious, bullying co-worker (Aaron Paul) woos her, with little success, but with a pushy cockiness that Jorge clearly envies. The tension level is low—little emerges about the characters’ pasts or their lives outside the diner, which amplifies the claustrophobia but lets Barron focus tightly on the surging, repressed, subtly portrayed emotions at play.

Over the course of his prolific career, Barron has jumped from genre to genre, but “Choking Man” is a throwback for him, past his ’00s British films and oddball ’90s Hollywood features such as “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “Coneheads” to his early music-video days. Like two of his   best-known projects, A-Ha’s “Take On Me” and Dire Straits’ “Money For Nothing,” “Choking Man” uses innovative animation to lend a sophisticated, dreamy shape to a fairly standard product. In this case, what looks like an ambitious film-school project, complete with heavy-handed sincerity, experimental camera style, and an overplayed central metaphor, becomes gently lyrical and melancholy. It’s romance a la Miranda July—awkward and quirky, tender and raw, and like life, without a guaranteed happy ending.

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