Man Push Cart: A Melancholy Pull

“For all his calm, Ahmad seems always on the verge of catastrophe. Which makes his doggedness seem both delusional and weirdly noble.”

Man Push Cart is a dark, bleak, intense picture, but Bahrani’s narrative touch is a fairly light one. Ahmad, we learn, has a young son, whom he almost never sees. His wife died a year ago; we’re never told the cause of her death, but we know that her mother blames Ahmad for it, and is keeping the boy from seeing his father, as a form of revenge. We also learn that Ahmad was once a successful singer in Pakistan—“the Bono of Lahore”—and that he gave up his promising pop career to come to America with the woman he loved. We hear almost none of his music, however, and we see nothing of his prior success. Indeed, whenever he is offered the opportunity to sing, Ahmad demurs or shrinks away. The only person who brings up Ahmad’s career with any regularity is Mohammad (Charles Daniel Sandoval), the Pakistani American yuppie who is a regular at his cart and who seems to want to take him under his wing.

Bahrani drops hints about Ahmad’s previous existence, but rarely does he offer much context. The one flashback we get is a fleeting memory, a brief thought our hero has as he sits in his cocoonlike cart, dreaming of a better life that may have already passed. Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, and 2008’s Goodbye Solo constitute what has been called Bahrani’s American Dream Trilogy, but that description is as sardonic as it is suggestive. These characters may dream, but they rarely state that outright, or show it. The only time Ahmad mentions America, ironically, is when he has to illegally bury a dead cat: “This is fucking America,” he says bitterly. “And whatever I want to do, I’ll do.”

So the hope is dim, and so is the cart, which emits a weak glow amid the cold, gray blankness of the city. There’s nothing warm or inviting about this enclosure, save for a triceratops sticker near the window, which we eventually learn was placed there by Ahmad’s late wife for their baby son. For most of the film, the carts become displays for Ahmad and the other vendors, who seem vulnerable and exposed in these spaces, always watched but never seen, somehow both present and invisible. In the world of Man Push Cart, the vendor is as much on exhibit as his or her products—and just as meaningless.

Bahrani and cinematographer Michael Simmonds keep the camera close on Ahmad. The streets through which our hero pulls his cart are not specified; this is a New York without landmarks, without movie magic, a transient place. At his regular corner in Midtown Manhattan, his customers are almost exclusively office workers and people passing through. The only community here is the one among the different vendors, but even that feels temporary. (Bahrani’s early films have sometimes been characterized as neorealist, and while he has taken some issue with this designation, they do share with Italian neorealism this tendency to deromanticize their otherwise familiar settings, to present iconic cities shorn of recognizable buildings and skylines.) And yet the offscreen roar of Manhattan still gives us a cold, forbidding sense of place. Shot with long lenses that compress and flatten distances, and that often allow the camera to remain several blocks away from the performer, the cars and buses—which are real cars and buses, not movie vehicles whose drivers have been instructed not to run over the actor—look dangerously close to Ahmad as he winds his way through traffic. Other times, he becomes a silhouette amid the bright, harsh store displays or digital tickers or office-building entrances—a shadow puppet without agency or specificity. That sense of fragility keeps us on edge throughout the film. For all his calm, Ahmad seems always on the verge of catastrophe. Which makes his doggedness seem both delusional and weirdly noble.

The glancing quality of Bahrani’s storytelling—his ability to economically present emotional color without giving much narrative detail or fully indulging in the pathos of Ahmad’s situation—enhances the feeling of existential dislocation. We grasp Ahmad’s loss and his guilt without ever closing in on the exact causes, something that is echoed by the film’s visual strategy of alternating between intimate close-ups and almost abstract wide shots. Ahmad’s pseudoromance with Noemi (Leticia Dolera), the lovely Spanish woman holding down the fort at a nearby newsstand, is never really consummated beyond a hesitant, abortive kiss late in the picture. Their mutual attraction is both furthered and interrupted by Mohammad, who has his eyes on Noemi as well. (Occasional cutaways to Mohammad on the street, seen both waving to Ahmad and surreptitiously checking out Noemi, reinforce the idea of the vendors being on constant display.) Mohammad invites them both to a party and pretends that it was Ahmad who requested her presence; later, Mohammad asks Noemi to spend a weekend with him at his house outside the city, but she insists that Ahmad come along as well.

Mohammad’s advances thus bring Ahmad closer to Noemi but also render her off-limits to our hero. After arranging for Ahmad to work the door at a friend’s party, Mohammad brings Noemi to the event as his date, which in turn precipitates Ahmad’s departure and contributes to a falling-out between him and Mohammad. This all sounds rather heated and Sirkian, but in Bahrani’s hands, none of it is melodramatic: Ahmad leaves the party quietly, and never cites Noemi’s presence as his reason for doing so. The visit to Mohammad’s weekend home is understated; the network of desire among the trio is never fully expressed. It is evident to us that even though Ahmad longs for Noemi (and she for him), he can’t do anything about it, and perhaps doesn’t want to. It is even clear to Mohammad, who casually asks Ahmad if he’s seeing Noemi before revealing that he himself has asked her out to the opera. Both men seem to understand that this pushcart vendor will never try anything because he has nothing to offer Noemi—a subtle reminder that, in this dead-end world, money and status govern even sincere romantic affection.