i have no idea, now, how i got onto this film. i wish i knew. ramin bahrani visits some of the same haunted post-traumatic territory touched upon in red road, and it seems to me he may possibly do it with even greater focus. ahmad is a young pakistani man with a push cart and a stack of porn dvds in nyc. very early every morning he takes his push cart from the depot where it’s housed to his allotted spot on the sidewalk, by hand. after work he sells his dvds to people he meets on the street. the pulling of the cart in the liminal area between the large, heavy trafficked, still nocturnal new york avenue and the sidewalk is harrowing and, on occasion, heartbreaking, especially because bahrani puts it squarely at the center of his film and shows it to us over and over and over (it also puts one in mind of those films one has seen about subcontinental streets, full of lawless traffic and the constant threat of being run over: except, wrong time, wrong place). the light is orange-brownish and there are mostly taxis about. ahmad looks like the loneliest man in new york.
he is also the saddest man in new york. no attempt on the part of others to “help” him seem to work. his life is stuck in misery land. we never see him sleep or rest, except on his long way back to brooklyn on the train, where, in the glaring neon light, he looks entirely adrift in the world.
this is not an easy film to watch. it is unsentimental and, were it not for its insistent, repetitive, melancholy soundtrack and ahmad’s beautiful face, almost devoid of clues as to how we should feel about this man. yet it hurts to watch it. there is a whole sub-story with a little cat that will kill those of us who like pets. i can’t say anything about the story without giving away the wondrous way in which bahrani takes us to the desolate province of trauma, not through representing the trauma, but by slowly guiding our way into it by showing its deadening aftermath. the repetition of the ritual of the cart pushing, ahmad’s refusal to fit in, his smoking and slow drinking, and especially his inability to accept love and help and hope tell the story much more poignantly than if we were actually told the story.
watch, too, for the amazing way in which ahmad personal trauma points, as trauma always does, to many other, collective traumas — from immigration to persecution to sexism to poverty.
what struck me most strongly in this film is the representation of the mysterious and maddening fact that people in pain will be helped only on terms that are incomprehensible to us and most likely to them, too. offering help to those who are stuck in hell is extremely dangerous. it’s a danger from which the movie does not discourage the viewer, not at all. drops of kindness moisten the lips and make another day possible. but don’t feel hurt or angry if the man who has pushed himself outside of life cannot relate to you in terms you can understand. despair has its own language. it dictates its own terms.
i recommend this strongly.
I’ve been trying to get this since it was released, and I keep getting bumped. DAMN it. But I had heard about it last year, and cannot wait to see it.
huh. i wonder why. i got it straight away. maybe you are getting bumped because i hogged it while feverishly watching episode after episode of the wire.
i just watched the two shorts that come with the dvd and i think dogs will be too hard for arnab to watch. now i’m worried, because i know arnab doesn’t read comments in threads concerning a film he hasn’t yet watched, so how can this warning work for him?
oh, and, mike, i just checked your netflix queue and, well, man push cart isn’t even there. not that that’s any of my business, but how are you getting bumped, exactly?
Yeah it is. 4th now; it was 1st, then moved lower after Sicko came out, and now I’m trying to make it seem like I don’t want it as much so that maybe I get it as a ‘second choice’ or something. You probably can’t see it on my queue because the Friends function shows the films in the order you put them in your queue, and I put in in there … ah, way back. Whenever I read the review in the NY Times and assumed it wouldn’t make it to the twin cities.
Wow. That seems awful defensive, doesn’t it? I’ll go and rate it now, too, before seeing it.
most of my comments on this blog are defensive.
Really great film; I think your review is so acutely on-target I have trouble knowing what I could add. (I’m particularly taken by your second-to-last paragraph, and the smart points about the seeming incommensurability of Ahmad’s need and the terms of solace/help offered him.)
I’d add only that I wish the soundtrack was removed from the film, because the impressionistic pulse of the editing, the repetition of scenes from his daily work, the background white noise of busy and more-empty streets, the cinematography’s attention to the smallest details of light/dark and the endless reflective surfaces fragmenting and echoing what we see… the film’s like a melancholy poem. I didn’t need the score. But them’s small complaints.
I really liked “Dogs”, as well. Great films.
the soundtrack annoyed me too.
mike, i would like to ask if you, too, found yourself thinking about red road, and comparing the two films, while watching this.
It’s hard to say, G. I might have started making such comparisons ’cause you cued me to.
That said, they both build their narratives by circling around their protagonists, carefully accumulating details (of the social context and physical environments around them; of the lives they lead and the histories which led them to the current impasse).
But I think Red‘s protagonist got under my skin more — unsurprisingly? She, after all, is more of an agent–while Ahmad is (frustratingly?) passive, resisting action or even facial expressions which might give us in the audience more of a hook. I think I admire that–but got more out of Red. The sense of mystery–what happened?–fuels both films, but in Red there’s also a keen tense anxiety about what might happen, and that film kept surprising me…. whereas Man Push seemed to resist our desire for stronger narrative lines. Except in one way…
SPOILER:
I think, pondering it today, that the one place where the plot of Man Push becomes more overt is when his cart gets stolen… and I found that pretty aggravating, as well; it seemed a cliched ex machina twist. And it banked on an action by Ahmad that seemed not just out of character but whimsical in a way he never is. (Now Jeff can feel free to come in and rip me for wanting a logic of character here, when I was loosey-goosey with the Coens’ film. But I think it’s different–the ghostly disappearance of Chigurh in that film *is* in character.) Ahmad seems to be punished (further punished) for an act because the film needed an overt act of punishment. I’d have been fine with any number of ways to see him pushed further down… this just struck me as a breakdown of the naturalistic, resistant-to-plot and -identification of the narrative in all other ways.
What did you think of the theft?
i don’t find chop shop mentioned anywhere else, so, since the search function should be working pichikino, i’m going to give it a glorious shout out here. man, this ramin bahrani guy sure knows how to capture the soiled, sooty, scabby, putrescent underside of america (chop shop puts winter’s bone to shame) — not the underside that could, conceivably, make headlines, but the unglamorous exploitation of the weakest that goes unnoticed and unreported even though (because?) we all benefit from it.
chop shop, which at least some of you must have seen, is about alejandro, a street kid with preternatural determination, resourcefulness, and stamina. he’s at it every day, relentlessly, nonstop. the movie is a harsh look at stolen childhoods, but what really hits you is the even harsher look at hardened adults who, while not being entirely objectionable, are also oblivious to the established fact that, in 21st century america, children should be entitled to their childhood.
i love that bahrani sets this in new york, and that both adults and children know that they are in some free-zone in which the laws of civilization don’t apply. no cops, no licenses, not legitimate trade. no one to ask what alejandro is doing peddling crap and working himself to the bone instead of going to school. no one to check on anyone else. in queens. in one of the boroughs of one of the capitals of the western world.
i want to read this against the mythology of 9/11, the outrage at the fact that cave-dwelling terrorists dared to attack NEW YORK CITY. what if they had attacked port au prince instead? delhi? palermo? i want to be angry at the fact that new york city is port au prince, delhi, palermo, rio, and mogadishu, only no one cares because there are enough rich people in it to make us forget about the poor.
bahrani is one of the greatest cinematographical poets of the american slum.
i just finished goodbye solo, the most recent of bahrani’s film, and i’m breathless. it’s his most accomplished one. a sucker punch of a film. really excellent.