Man Push Cart (2005)- Sisyphean Neorealism
I grew up in an immigrant household in Chicago, schooling downtown and relying on public transportation to get anywhere. When you grow up in the city, you become aware of all the different lives being lived at the same moment you live yours. I’ll overhear the man on the train talking on the phone about the car accident that will burden him with repair costs for the next coming months. I watch the construction workers eat their sandwiches (pre-Covid) from their mini coolers, exhausted from a day of hard work, and reminding me of my father. I witness families sightseeing in Chicago and children gazing through the window, probably captivated by the towering skyscrapers that make them feel like little ants. Each person I come across has a story, filled with their own struggles, their network of people, and their own perception of the world founded on personal experiences and affairs. To be one among millions of people, invisible or extra visible to spectating eyes, is staggering. They are incomprehensible to me as much as I am to them. And that my friend, is absurd.
Man Push Cart, an indie film by the Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani, spotlights an immigrant story in the alienating New York City. Ahmad, a Pakistani immigrant, is a cart vendor that lives day-to-day, providing coffee and bagels to New York executives, tourists, and regular passers. Every day, he wakes up before daylight, takes the train to Manhattan, retrieves his vendor cart from the garage, pushes his cart to his destination, and prepares the donuts, tea, and coffee for the morning rush. Every day, he disassembles his cart, hauls it to the garage while rimming taxis and buses, interacts with his fellow street vendors, and heads home carrying a propane tank. Every day. A confounding exhibition of American neo-realism and neoliberalism vérité.
Ramin Bahrani has cited two inspirations for this film, one having philosophical origins and one being a poetic verse. The incessant and graphic depiction of trying to earn money by selling $1.50 coffee is directly influenced by The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. In this influential book of existential philosophy, Camus meditates on the modern human condition of living without meaning. The Greek tale of Sisyphus is about a punished king condemned to push a rock up a hill for eternity. Each time he gets to the top, he must roll it back up and start over. This Sisyphean struggle is exhibited through Ramin Bahrani’s neorealism, taking the viewers along through the course of Ahmad’s days and showing us the absurd developments that distinguish one day from another.
Camus states that absurdity begins when the “chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again” (Myth of Sisyphus 12). Doing the same mechanical routine, “one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement… Weariness comes at the end of a mechanical life, but at the same time, it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening” (13).
Ahmad is quite the contemplative guy, and we don’t really get to know him. We only see his day-to-day experiences and I genuinely felt taunted by the distance between Ahmad and the viewer. Throughout the film, he is met with three absurdities that break his mechanical routine of street vending. One, he meets an affluent Pakistani immigrant and gives him work as a nice gesture. The man ends up recognizing him for his career prior to coming to the States, as a well-known pop star in Pakistan. Two, he meets a Spanish girl that works at a bodega, and there is a mutual spark that I think frightens Ahmad (I’m not sure because he is a very difficult-to-read character). The story develops very slowly, and we gradually get to know Ahmad better. Third, he adopts a stray cat to alleviate the loneliness of living in a foreign city. Since I really recommend this film and don’t want to spoil anything, I’ll just say the viewer gets to see how these absurdities develop within the film, and if these affinities animate him from his mechanical routine, or if he gradually returns to the same old.
Ramin Bahrani was also inspired by the Sufi poet and mystic Rumi verse: “I am the polo stick; you are the ball. Wherever I hit you, you will go; but wherever you go, I have to follow you.” In Ahmad’s solemn determination to pay off his cart balance, buy a better apartment, and reunite with his son, he is ceaselessly adapting to the challenges he encounters. He is never moralizing his struggles or wrestling at the world’s cruelty. In fact, he is untroubled to lend someone a helping hand when he himself is faced with great adversity. His general altruism to the world obliges the audience to root for him throughout the length of the film and feel mutual devastation when life doesn’t give him a break. This verse also is present in the general dichotomy between the on-screen character and audience members, as we are following wherever Ahmad and the movie wherever it takes us, even the mundane routine.
While the film is minimal, it is intense. The viewer excretes empathy with each scene, and you can only hope that conditions get better for the vendor underworld. The aim of this film is not to convey hope, however, as the immigrant experience in the States is a survival struggle and the film reflects that to its core. Particularly for Eastern immigrants working at the street level, the film depicts their invisibility amidst the exposure of their marketed products and the hypervisibility to the racists bearing anti-Muslim rhetoric following 9/11. This film can be interpreted as a study of the “American Dream” and how conflated and outdated the notion was, is, and always will be. It can also be viewed through a Marxist lens through the capitalism-generated alienation that is saturated in Ahmad’s character.
Man Push Cart is a lesson in empathy, a dramatization of absurdity, and a meditation on existence from a perspective of neoliberal and immigrant alienation. It is bleak but necessarily so to not romanticize the conditions of nonnative Americans trying to find their place in the big city. It is the insider look at the person on the train with exhaustive work written on their face. While incomprehensible to me and you, they are just as complex and deep and humane as me and you are. This film is a slice of life, a testiment to how cinema can immerse us in the problems of the characters and impose their questions onto us. It’s a demonstration of how discomforting it can feel, watching lifelike struggles play out through the screen while you’re watching from a cozy bed, knowing that there are people working laborious jobs at the same moment you are immersed in a film. It’s definitely a harrowing feeling, surely relatable to other immigrant families, to watch your parents head to work at 5 am or waging late shifts. Immigrants are truly the foundation of America. Notice them! Appreciate them!
Sources:
Bahrani, Ramin. Man Push Cart (2005).
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus (1942).
https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/issue-7-february-2007/man-push-cart/
