Review: Man Push Cart

Ramin Bahrani casts nearly every scene as a disingenuous, pedantic example of the cosmos’s callous cruelty.

Man Push Cart
Photo: Koch Lorber Films

Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi) suggests a modern-day Sisyphus, finding himself condemned by tragedy to spend his days and nights pulling his coffee and donut cart through New York City’s bustling streets, his load a symbol of his inescapable sorrow. Writer-director Ramin Bahrani’s Man Push Cart follows its forlorn protagonist—a former pop singer known in his native Pakistan as “the Bono of Lahore”—through his grueling dawn-to-dusk routine of lugging his stand and propane tank to and from his proscribed city corner, stacking muffins and prepping paper cups with teabags, trying to sell bootleg porn DVDs in his free time, and occasionally venturing out to nightclubs with his Westernized Pakistani friends.

Bahrani’s portrait of existential urban malaise posits a world in which Ahmad’s interpersonal interactions lead merely to further humiliation and misery, from his tense dealings with a Pakistani businessman (Charles Daniel Sandoval) and the accusatory mother-in-law (Razia Mujahid) who won’t let him see his son (Hassan Razvi), to his awkward relationship with Spanish newsstand vendor Noemi (Leticia Dolera) to whom he’s incapable of expressing his tentative romantic feelings. The film heightens its overall sense of fatalism through a moody depiction of midtown Manhattan as a place of cheerless nocturnal shadows and faces, a pessimism that it occasionally alleviates with brief moments of tenderness, such as Ahmad’s care for the tiny kitten that serves as a surrogate for his real offspring.

The film’s tight compositions effectively mirror the oppressive constrictiveness of both Ahmad’s cart and the weight of his grief. But Man Push Cart is ultimately one-note, exuding a cold, omniscient perspective that increasingly becomes akin to that of a scientist clinically watching a rat futilely search for a bite of cheese at the end of a maze. And finally, the filmmaker’s labored attempts to avoid trafficking in hope have the deleterious effect of casting nearly every scene as a disingenuous, pedantic example of the cosmos’s callous cruelty.

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Score: 
 Cast: Ahmad Razvi, Leticia Dolera, Charles Daniel, Ali Reza, Farooq Mohammad, Upendran K. Panicker, Arun Lal, Razia Mujahid, Hassan Razvi, Mustafa Razvi, Altaf Houssein, Bill Lewis  Director: Ramin Bahrani  Screenwriter: Ramin Bahrani  Distributor: Koch Lorber Films  Running Time: 87 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2006  Buy: Video

Nick Schager

Nick Schager is the entertainment critic for The Daily Beast. His work has also appeared in Variety, Esquire, The Village Voice, and other publications.

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