Man Push Cart

Ramin Bahrani’s Man Push Cart begins before the crack of dawn as Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi), a Pakistani immigrant in New York, heaves his mobile coffee stand up a street bathed in the impatient headlights of nocturnal traffic. The scene recurs with cyclical inevitability throughout the film, structuring the story around the laborious repetition of Ahmad’s daily grind. Accruing metaphorical potency as Ahmad’s uphill struggle to make ends meet gets steeper, the image becomes indelible.

Returning to the US following a stint in his parents’ homeland, Iran, where he made his student film Strangers (2000), Bahrani shows Manhattan from the other side of the bagel counter, outlining Abmad’s practised routine – the igniting of his boiler, the tidy piling up of pastries, the restocking of disposable cups – in acutely observed detail. Uncommon in US cinema, this fascination with the quotidian reveals an affinity with the work of the Dardenne brothers, recalling the similar rituals undertaken on a waffle stand by the heroine of their 1999 film Rosetta. Like the Dardennes, Bahrani insists on the dignity of professionalism, irrespective of the mundanity of the task, and similarly emphasises Ahmad’s vital dependence on these procedures as the anchor to his increasingly fraught existence.

The performance by Razvi, himself a cart vendor plucked off the street by the director, is remarkable, imparting a poignant susceptibility to Ahmad’s surface stoicism. Once a popular singing star in Lahore, Ahmad has acclimatised to a lowlier place in his new city’s pecking order. Dedicatedly applying himself to a workaday existence defined by transactions, he trades hot drinks and morning friendliness by day and pirate DVDs off duty. He is also forced to barter with the hostile parents of his late wife for time with the estranged son they have taken into supervision, whom Ahmad attempts to placate with what toys he can afford. Even his courtship of Noemi (Leticia Dolera), the Spanish woman working at a nearby news-stand, is predicated on a series of informal deals: the team effort in restacking her cart’s refrigerator, then her trading of music magazines for a cup of tea.

Much of Man Push Cart’s dramatic tension comes from Ahmad’s dealings with Muhammad (Charles Daniel Sandoval), a wealthy fellow ex-pat whose attitude to Ahmad oscillates treacherously. Initially hiring him for some decorating work, when Mohammad recognises Ahmad he is untactfully astonished at the depths to which the former celebrity has sunk and embarrassed by Ahmad’s subservience, telling him not to wash their takeaway dishes as ‘there’s someone else to do that’. His priorities shift after he is introduced to Noemi, when he takes advantage of Ahmad’s emotional reticence to make a more assertive play for her affections. During a group weekend in the country, Mohammad feels no compunction in asking Ahmad to take out the rubbish while he steals a moment alone with Noemi.

If Bahrani’s approach were not so judiciously even-handed, his film might have become a dank wallow in pathos. But Ahmad is not simply a downtrodden innocent, handicapped by circumstances. His inability to express his feelings for Noemi and his unwillingness to capitalise on the opportunities offered him by Mohammad reveal a frustrating inertia in contrast with his work life tenacity; while Mohammad is less the villain of the piece than someone whose own desires undermine his intended charity. The scene in which a Muslim acquaintance of Ahmad reveals a large abdominal scar, the result of an incident in which a gang took him for a ‘terrorist’, gives a powerfully understated acknowledgement of the contemporary racial tensions facing immigrant populations in the west. More melodramatic Manhattans might have thronged with muggers and miscreants; in Man Push Cart New Yorkers seem affably benign, keen to converse while Ahmad makes their cappuccinos, if lamentably oblivious to his quiet tragedy.

This review features in the October 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.

Snow Cake

Midway through Snow Cake, a neighbour of high-functioning autistic woman Linda Freeman (Sigourney Weaver) says: ‘I know all about autism. I’ve seen that movie.’ The reference, surely, is to Hollywood’s most famous dalliance with the condition, Barry Levinson’s Rain Man. Snow Cake, directed by Marc Evans from a first screenplay by Angela Pell, mocks such faith in cinema’s ability to ameliorate ignorance about complex medical conditions, but simultaneously strives to provide such a service itself. The film-makers attempt to have their cake and eat it.

Snow Cake begins amid the dazzle of white light streaming through a cabin window of the plane in which Englishman Alex Hughes (Alan Rickman) pensively watches the cloudscapes high over Canada. Journeying to meet the mother of a son he never met, who has been killed in a road accident, Alex’s lingering grief is limned in Rickman’s haggard features, his ebbing spirit externalised in the blanched northern skies and melting snow. In a schematic early twist, a truck crashes into his car, killing a young hitchhiking passenger, Vivienne, and Alex takes a detour to the small town of Wawa to console Vivienne’s mother, Linda.

Reminiscent of The Sweet Hereafter and Insomnia in its use of a wintry backdrop to its protagonist’s corrosive guilt, it more closely resembles Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground, in which an embittered cop finds spiritual renewal in snowy upstate New York when he meets a blind woman whose simple faith restores his humanity. Vivienne’s mother offers similar salvation for Alex: he is by turns alarmed and amused by Linda’s childlike behaviour, neurotic preoccupations and apparent indifference to her daughter’s death. But, in a process neatly, though not always subtly, mirrored in the snow thawing around Wawa, Alex warms to Linda, seeing in her emotional forthrightness and euphoric outbursts an alternative to his own morose wallowing.

Weaver captures Linda’s polar modes of agitation and entrancement with striking verisimilitude. One scene in which she and Alex play ‘comic-book Scrabble’, taking turns to invent a word and then use it in an improvised sentence, is delightful. Weaver holds the viewer spellbound as Linda coins ‘dazlious’ to trump Alex’s lacklustre effort, and her spontaneous sentence is a liquid, spiralling flight of fancy that testifies to her extraordinary mental dexterity. But Weaver’s performance can seem too studied an impersonation, a work of mimicry that feels at times like a starry jaunt through an autistic tick list.

The film’s ploy is to make Alex seem at home in a strange town – he is quickly prized by Wawa’s community for his English accent and all but jumped upon by another of Linda’s neighbours, Maggie (Carrie-Anne Moss) – but a stranger in Linda’s autistic world, where he has to fumble around for a binding logic. He makes a better job of the latter than some of the bit parts, who stand around citing familiar suppositions about autism or bemoaning Linda’s social etiquette (‘this is a wake!’ cries one lady at Vivienne’s funeral, aghast at Linda’s lack of solemnity). But the script falls foul of cliché itself, attributing an innate innocence to Linda that sentimentalises her condition. Teetering into whimsy when Linda imagines escaping the dreary funeral reception for a posthumous dance with Vivienne, Snow Cake ultimately collapses around its own soft centre.

This review features in the October 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.