Man Push Cart

last updated 8 January 2015

Ahmad is a Pakistani immigrant whose struggle to survive in New York is a 'œSisyphean daily grind,' said Stephen Holden in The New York Times. The inspiration for this spare, bleak film was, in fact, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus' meditation on the futility of life. In the wee hours before sunrise, Ahmad commutes by subway from his Brooklyn apartment to midtown Manhattan, where he sells coffee and doughnuts from his stainless-steel pushcart. Ahmad is played by Ahmad Razvi, who in real life is a former pushcart vendor, said Dana Stevens in Slate.com. As he doles out breakfast and the occasional bootleg porn tape to harried office workers, his haggard features slowly reveal their secret. 'œThis is a guy with some serious back story.' Eventually, he encounters a wealthy Pakistani named Mohammed, who recognizes Ahmad as a former rock star. The film never reveals why Ahmad has been reduced to menial labor in New York. But as we watch him pushing his cart to work each morning, 'œwe start to root for him in spite of a sneaking feeling that, sometime in the past, he may have screwed up pretty badly.' Man Push Cart has won a handful of awards, said Michael Atkinson in The Village Voice, and has been compared to Vittorio De Sica's neorealist masterpiece The Bicycle Thief. But Bahrani lacks the Italian director's narrative urgency. 'œThe sociopolitical conflict at the heart of the immigration 'issue' is hardly engaged.'

Rating: Not Rated