The remarkable achievement of Bahrani's film, which premiered at Sundance in 2006, is to make this everyday grind look absolutely real and absolutely grueling, yet make us understand why Ahmad keeps plugging away at it without succumbing to hopelessness or despondency. Even more remarkable, Bahrani does this in a thoroughly cinematic manner, transforming mostly drab details into a tone poem of evocative images and sounds. By commercial-film standards, Man Push Cart is a study in bare-bones minimalism, sketching its events and characters without an unnecessary shot or wasted word. But this accounts for much of its power. Rarely are the style and content of a film interwoven as seamlessly and appropriately as they are here; by the final scene you don't feel you've merely observed Ahmad's everyday grind, you feel you've stood at his side through all of it emerging, like Ahmad himself, with ongoing hope that pushing the gigantic rock must ultimately have some kind of payoff.
Not every scene in Man Push Cart finds Ahmad peddling his bagels on Sixth Avenue, and in some parts of the story he manages to have a social life. Buying cigarettes from a newsstand cart one day, he meets a young Spanish woman named Noemi who's in the same line of work, and as they get better acquainted it looks like romance might develop. Ahmad also takes a second job, refurbishing the apartment of Mohammad, a yuppie who's from Pakistan like him, and this provides another companion to hang out with. From their conversations we discover that Ahmad was once a pop-music star in Pakistan, although we never learn why his former, more successful life didn't last. It probably had something to do with the death of his wife, leaving him with a little boy who now lives with Ahmad's angry, resentful in-laws. Being able to support his son someday is the dream that keeps Ahmad going. But his income is so shaky even with his extra job, and his sideline of selling porn DVDs that the slightest hitch could ruin all his plans. He's saved enough to make the first payment on a pushcart of his own; what if for some reason he can't make the second?
Bahrani is an Iranian-American who went to college in New York and then lived for three years in Iran, where he made a student film. After a stay in Paris, he returned to the U.S. and started preparing Man Push Cart, his first feature. His second movie, the 2007 drama Chop Shop, is another New York story, this time about a poor Latino man. So far in his career, Bahrani has shown a consistent and commendable interest in exploring facets of American life too dreary and unromantic for Hollywood, or even most independents, to take much notice of.
Another unusual aspect of Man Push Cart is its plot structure, which begins where a conventional movie would end leaving out the backstory of Ahmad's music career and letting us piece this history together from bits and pieces of dialogue. The film is indirect in other ways as well: Ahmad's friendship with Noemi is so uncertain and indecisive that there's no telling where it might lead, and although his relationship with Mohammad starts extremely well Mohammad's connections might even get him into the New York music scene it's unclear how reliable the yuppie is. These elements give the story additional layers of psychological interest.
Bahrani researched the production by spending countless hours with real-life pushcart vendors, and to play Ahmad he recruited Ahmad Razvi, a Pakistani-American businessman and community activist who was once a pushcart man himself. Razvi is extraordinarily good, as are the professional actors who play the other main characters. Some parts of Bahrani's technique shooting on a tight three-week schedule, using "live" locations with unstaged background action, casting a first-time actor in the leading role link him with Italian neorealists, French New Wave filmmakers, and more recent realists like Ken Loach and Abbas Kiarostami, the greatest Iranian filmmaker of them all. Bahrani also has much in common with American independents like Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant, who share his empathy with people on the margins of society. On the DVD's commentary track, Bahrani says that in Hollywood movies a pushcart vendor is always a pair of disembodied hands; what he wanted to do was let the customers be disembodied hands, while showing the pushcart guy as a fully rounded person. Extras on the DVD include two Bahrani shorts also minimalist, and very brief and the commentary track with Bahrani and three collaborators, who discuss everything from the title (borrowed from a thirteenth-century Persian poem) to their taste in films (Robert Bresson, John Cassavetes, and of course Kiarostami) and the challenges of shooting a movie with long, carefully choreographed takes that often had to be done dozens of times before they came out right. Man Push Cart is a modest picture, as unpretentious and unglamorous as its characters and their workaday jobs. To make a powerful impression on these terms is a notable cinematic feat, marking Bahrani as a young filmmaker with a very promising future.
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by David Sterritt
