Intrigued by shyness in ‘Choking Man’
The densely populated urban crossroads of Jamaica, Queens, is the setting for the psychological drama, “Choking Man.” Writer-director Steve Barron’s ambitiously kaleidoscopic treatment of the experiences of a pathologically shy dishwasher from Ecuador draws together a compelling mix of characters but isn’t always successful in its attempt to merge social and magic realism.
A major juncture of the New York City transit system and nearby to John F. Kennedy International Airport, Jamaica is home to a slew of multicultural enclaves, and Barron focuses on a handful who have come to work at the unpretentious Olympic Diner. Clean but Spartan, the diner is an old school Greek coffee shop with a long counter and half a dozen booths running along the windows.
Owned and run by the philosophically inclined Rick (Mandy Patinkin) and his stoic wife (Marika Daciuk), the Olympic is an archetypal place for new immigrants and other disenfranchised souls to find work. As the film opens, Rick hires Amy, a young woman from China played with unstinting optimism by the charming Eugenia Yuan.
Amy quickly injects the restaurant with some much-needed sunshine, even if her bright outlook is not always shared by her customers or co-workers. She befriends a troubled, middle-age waitress, Teri (Kate Buddeke), and is targeted for romancing by the fast-talking wiseacre, Jerry (Aaron Paul), who works in the kitchen.
It’s the excruciatingly introverted Jorge (Octavio Gomez Berrios), however, who most intrigues Amy as she recognizes in him a fellow sensitive individual a long way from home. Unable to lift his pained eyes up from the pots, pans and floors he scrubs each day, Jorge is prevented from pursuing the tentative friendship by his debilitating shyness.
Barron -- a top 1980s music-video auteur (Michael Jackson, Dire Straits, A-Ha) who went on to direct the features “Electric Dreams,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “Coneheads” -- follows Jorge home to the Harlem apartment he shares with a figure who berates him in Spanish and who may or may not be real. Jorge’s fragile grasp on his sanity is such that he is bedeviled not only by his inner demons, but by a stray cat, the aggressive Jerry and the Catholic iconography that fills his lonely nights -- not to mention the Heimlich maneuver poster on the diner’s wall that gives the film its title.
Barron punctuates the low-key naturalism of the workaday diner environment with surreal animated vignettes by Marina Zurkow. “Choking Man” mainly falters in its inability to reconcile the darker psychological elements of Jorge’s mind and all that they portend. Despite the persuasive nature of the characters, who refreshingly seem to have lives that exist before and after the time span of the film, and the fine performances that inhabit them, there is little resonance to what we’ve witnessed.
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“Choking Man.” MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 22 minutes. At Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500.
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