Man Push Cart

Man Push Cart is definitely a Movie That’s Good for You: it shows us a slice of city life that we know is there, but often do not know much about.  Further, in many cases, we don’t want to know about it, because our lives of convenience and ease are built upon people like Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi), the man who is pushing a cart, struggling to eke out marginal existences between the pinnacles of gleaming steel.

Ahmad is an immigrant, a former Pakistani rock star who, through circumstances not entirely clear, has ended up operating one of those ubiquitous Manhattan push carts.   Every morning, beginning at 3:30 am, he struggles to push his stainless-steel coffee cart through the New York traffic to its appointed spot.  There, harried Manhattan office workers buy coffee and bagels to jump start their day.  In the afternoon, he reverses his route, struggling to return the cart back to it’s rented spot.

Ahmad is purchasing the cart on credit from a man who is a cart-pusher himself, and who is also in the business of financing and selling the contraptions to his countrymen.  Ahmad has a son, living with his dead wife’s parents, with whom he dreams of being reunited.  His in-laws blame him for their daughter’s death — the nature of which is also unclear — and will hardly let him see the child.

Man Push Cart follows Ahmad through a slice of his life as he moves from situation to situation.  He speaks in a surface, server-to-client way with the yuppies who buy his coffee.  He is befriended by Mohammad (Charles Daniel Sandoval), who “helps” him by allowing him to paint his flat.  He has an awkward romance with a fellow immigrant (Leticia Dolera).  And all within the rhythms of his day, of pushing the cart, morning and night, morning and night.

As an immigrant, Ahmad is truly dependent upon the kindness of strangers.  He has few real friends, all his relationships are unequal.  He is indebted to a fellow Pakistani who has sold him the pushcart on credit.  He works odd jobs for Mohammad, who has promised to hook him up with a producer to get his career going again.  It is undoubtedly not a spoiler to say that it doesn’t work out.

In an interview with New York Magazine, director Ramin Bahrani talks about his inspiration for the film:

When Bush began to bomb Afghanistan, I realized that all the Afghans I’d ever known were pushcart vendors in New York City. Then I began to think of Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus, and pushing these carts seemed like a modern-day version.

Indeed, as he says later in the piece, the events of 9/11 — though never mentioned in the film — hang over it, like a dark mist.  The Pakistani community in New York was targeted by violence, police harassment and profiling after the bombings.  Bahrani’s lead actor Razvi organized a community group to help fight against such excesses.  What he has seen has etched a deep sadness in his face, that ameliorates somewhat the lack of professionalism in his performance.

The film was shot in a matter of weeks, some of it “guerilla style,” where its subjects did not know they were being filmed.  Bahrani frames his action exquisitely, and uses many almost abstract close-ups to convey the reality of Ahmad’s life.  Bahrani editedthe film himself, and tied its rhythm to the daily pushing and pulling of his protagonist’s cart.  Director of Photography  Michael Simmonds’ vision of New York is stunningly beautiful; it only heightens the contrast between those that inhabit the glittering towers and those that live between and beneath.

Although stylistically miles apart, Man Push Cart reminds me thematically of Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things. Although that film has a thriller framework, it affords us the same look at a population not often treated on film.  Like its hero Okwe, Ahmad toils for pennies so that middle- and upper-class city dwellers can enjoy their perks at reasonable cost.

Unlike Frears’ film, Man Push Cart doesn’t feel the need to tart up its message with suspense.  Pity, that: although Bahrani’s outing is wholly engrossing, perhaps it would have reached a wider audience if it had been more Hollywood.  After all, pandering sometimes makes the medicine go down, in the most delightful way.