Review of Man Push Cart (2006) by Will A — 21 Oct 2006

Every day at about 3 AM, Ahmad retrieves his pushcart from the storage garage and drags it many blocks through the streets of Manhattan until he arrives at his designated corner. Once there, he lights his stove, makes coffee, heats water for tea, and places his bagels and donuts in the display case to await the rush of morning commuters. When breakfast is over, he drags the cart back to the garage and spends the afternoon lugging an empty propane tank through the streets while trying to pick up extra cash selling bootleg porn DVDs. It's already dark by the time he returns to his dingy Brooklyn apartment, where he drinks beer to unwind until it's time to take the train back to Manhattan to once again pick up his pushcart. If he sleeps, we never see it.

Slowly, some sketchy details of Ahmad's life begin to unfold. He's from Lahore, Pakistan. He was a popular singer back home and released several successful CDs. His wife died one year earlier. He has a little boy who now lives with his in-laws. The in-laws refuse to let Ahmad see the child and blame him for their daughter's death.

Ahmad has many acquaintances but no real friends. He's quiet and polite and hardworking. He's trying to save up enough money to buy his vendor cart and later rent an apartment where he can live with his son. He makes a connection with a young Spanish woman who works at a nearby newsstand but his rich Pakistani "friend" Mohammad quickly swoops in to try to beat him to the punch.

Day after day we see Ahmad going through his same routine, up before dawn, struggling to pull his cart through heavy traffic as cabs whiz by all around him. I think just about every other review I've seen compares Ahmad's daily ordeal with that of the famous rock-pushing Greek god whose name I will not mention (it rhymes with "miss a bus") for fear of being labelled a copycat. (Now that I think about it, repeatedly missing buses would also be a pretty lousy way to spend eternity -- maybe even worse than pushing a rock up a hill.) Though I see the obvious parallels between the two stories, the idea that Ahmad is engaged in a futile struggle never crossed my mind as I watched this film. Rather, I found myself admiring his entrepreneurship and envying his freedom, thinking that his lifestyle was far more appealing than the lifestyles of the little drones who pause at his pushcart for bagels each morning on the way to their big shiny office buildings.

I'm a little puzzled by the title of this film. I assumed that at some point someone who spoke very little English -- a child perhaps -- would point to Ahmad as he was engaged in his daily "commute" and say "man...push...cart", but this never happened. Weird grammatical structure aside, Ahmad never actually [i]pushes[/i] the cart; he always [i]pulls[/i] it. At one point he actually loses his balance and the damn thing almost runs him over. It's not a big deal, I guess. Just something I was wondering about.

I liked this movie a lot even though nothing much ever happens, and the same "nothing much" happens over and over throughout the film. This is a slice-of-life film about a frustratingly enigmatic character whose life is about as monotonous as you can imagine. Though I'm sure some would find this to be a depressing movie, I didn't see it that way. Better to have difficult-to-attain dreams than none at all.