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.