Life as a 450-pound man in Mexican indie ‘Walking Distance’

While Alejandro Guzman Alvarez’s Mexican indie “Walking Distance” moves as slowly as its corpulent hero, it’s mostly gentle and sweet, if you can forgive its somewhat unsatisfactory third act.

[...] he takes a rare trip outside his apartment, an exhaustive trip to a nearby photography shop to get some rolls of what the old-timers call “film” developed.

With his entry into a brave new world, he buys a digital camera and gains a new friend:

Paolo (Joel Figueroa), the teenage worker at the photography store, which is owned by his father.

Through his images, he learns to see people and spatial surroundings differently, and that inspires him to take his own trip, with Paolo and Ramon.

Ortega, an untrained actor who is actually a musician and wrote the score for the film, is effective as Fede (Ortega’s large figure is augmented by makeup prosthetics).

Alvarez and cinematographer Diana Garay Vinas never make “Walking Distance” feel claustrophobic despite slow pacing and the large number of scenes in Fede’s small apartment.

G. Allen Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.