Ahmad is a sad young man. Once a budding rock star in Pakistan, with a hit album in 1995, he immigrated with his wife and son to the U.S. Somehow, he began selling bagels and coffee from a pushcart in midtown Manhattan. And then his wife died. Fast forward a year later: His mother-in-law blames Ahmad for his wife’s death and refuses to let him see her son. Thusly, Ahmad ends up losing his fame, his wife, and his son.
This is the point at which we enter Iranian-American filmmaker Ramin Bahrani’s second feature (and his first in the U.S.), the bittersweet Man Push Cart. Shot in documentary style, inclusive of the harsh headlights and ubiquitous traffic sounds that are the streets of New York, we are spectators to the life of Ahmad (played by Ahmad Razvi). He commutes every day, well before sunrise, from his Brooklyn hovel to a pushcart storage facility in midtown Manhattan. He picks up his cart, and physically drags it to his spot, several blocks away. With an almost orchestral cadence, he fills the industrial-size coffee filter, prepares and piles paper cups with tea bags, and arranges bagels and doughnuts in the tiny display window of his cart. This rhythm of his daily grind punctuates the film periodically. In fact, it is the one thing that grounds the audience. No matter what happens in the film, we always know that Ahmad will return to his cart and the comforting beat of his diurnal pulse.
Ahmad feeds the pigeons, he picks up stray kittens, he despairs the loss of his wife and his son, and he hopes to buy an apartment for him and his son to live in. He is human enough for us to identify with, but distant enough so that he exists in the nether regions of humanity. We see him persistently shrugging off any opportunity he might have to enter the mainstream. When recognized by a fellow Pakistani, Mohammad (Charles Arturo Sandoval), he barely acknowledges the praise (“He was the Bono of Lahore”) given to him for his former career as a musician.
When Mohammad tries to help him out of his grueling life, by getting him a job in a nightclub, Ahmad tries it for a short period (what seems like an hour, or less) and quits. Mohammad gives him odd jobs around the house for extra cash, but they remain unfinished. Ahmad meets Noemi (the uplifting Leticia Dolera) at a nearby newsstand where he buys his cigarettes, and although she takes an interest in him giving him an opportunity to escape his loneliness, he pushes her away. And the stray kitten that he finds and adopts - a symbol of his lost son, perhaps - he inadvertently ends up feeding it milk instead of water and gets it sick. So what makes this man want to continue in his life of sheer hardship? Who is Ahmad?
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