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Photo courtesy Noruz Films
He's Your Pusherman
Relevant and riveting, Rami Bahrani's Man Push Cart places contemporary American indie cinema just where it needs to be.
A few years ago, critic and scholar B. Ruby Rich pondered, what would an American version of Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn look like? Are American filmgoers ready to accept a formally rigorous and sociologically probing narrative feature set on their own soil? Would the usual expectations for American indie filmmaking – think Miramax and Sundance – still apply? More importantly, why aren’t our directors trying?
Part of the problem is demographic. Most filmmakers who enter the Sundance set are middle to upper class, educated white males mostly interested in twenty-something romantic coming of age stories. Further, it wouldn’t be a stretch to add that these film-schooled or self-taught directors have Hollywood or pseudo-Hollywood aspirations and therefore emphasize snappy dialogue and representational acting.
Related to that is a second problem: economics. Films are expensive and the supply outweighs the demand. To get into theaters, your film needs to appeal to the mainstream art house crowd. And whereas art directors in Taiwan, South Korea, and France can rely on government subsidies, the relative dearth of public support for the arts in the U.S. means filmmakers will max out credit cards, borrow from rich uncles, and make a film with at least some market appeal. So even indie films by minority filmmakers like Quinceañera and Red Doors, which are terrific and reflect community subjectivities, resemble mainstream American cinema in form and feel.
But then there are the exceptions. These are films whose cinematic grammar is inspired by international films without U.S. distribution. Films in the spirit and mold of Maya Deren, John Cassavetes, and Charles Burnett. Two of them hit the international film festival circuit hard this year, and both happen to be about Asian Americans. So Yong Kim’s In Between Days was called an Asian American Jia Zhang-ke film. Impressing critics from Berlin to Sundance to Toronto to Hong Kong, Kim’s debut captures the immigrant experience in close-ups rather than words.
The other is Rami Bahrani’s richly textured Man Push Cart, which is getting a limited release in New York and Los Angeles through Films Philos, a truly indie outfit. Man Push Cart turned heads upon premiering at Venice in 2005 and solidified its presence in the American film scene when it played at Sundance and then the prestigious New Directors/New Films festival in 2006.
The plot could be called a Pakistani American version of Italian Neorealism. Ahmad sells doughnuts and coffee from a cart in midtown Manhattan. His wife has just passed away, and to regain custody of his son, he slaves away all day at the cart and all night peddling pornographic DVDs to other working class men like him. He meets a fellow Pakistani who is among the wealthy customers who buy drinks from him every morning. Within their ethnic community are class disparities which lead to mistrust, exploitation, and despair. These internal conflicts are further complicated when we find out that Ahmad used to be a successful rock star in Pakistani (“the Bono of Lahore,” we’re told). How he ended up on the streets is never clear. As in Neorealism, what happens before and after the events in the story remain a mystery; what’s important are the sensations and desperations of a very tangible present.
Silence says a lot in this film. It hints how early Ahmad must wake up every morning. It highlights the uncomfortable interactions between the Pakistani cart vendor and his Caucasian customers. It captures the loneliness of Ahmad’s day-to-day routine. In one shot, the camera is left outdoors as we see Ahmad holding a propane tank while entering a classy apartment building. We see but don’t hear the man at the desk nervously asking Ahmad to leave the tank in the lobby. We don’t need the words, for we feel through icy silence what it’s like to be a Muslim in post-9/11 New York.
The film’s long introduction in particular works because the dialogue is scattered in as noise rather than the sole bearer of content. The sequence feels almost like a city symphony. In the pitch of darkness we see Ahmad emerge, pushing his cart against the awakening city. We witness his daily ritual: opening up the cart, arranging the doughnuts and paper cups, interacting with customers, closing up shop, and going door to door hawking porno into the wee of night. After a long subway ride back to Brooklyn, he gets a minimum of sleep before starting again at a little before 2am. The film then repeats.
By the end of the film, we know his routine intimately such that the interruptions stand out and give the film a narrative rhythm. Some of the interruptions are happy (he meets a Barcelona woman who works a newsstand nearby), some present more challenges (a set of businessmen propose a comeback concert for him). Nothing much happens from a narrative standpoint, but because the film creates its own pacing and organization through the scenic repetitions and interruptions, our interest and our sympathy is never lost. This allows the film to take its time in building to a heartbreaking climax so familiar to any fan of the cinema, but so effective nevertheless because the film – through its quiet, unassuming realism – has earned the right to use it.
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Man Push Cart depicts a very different cinematic New York City. It’s not the glamorous New York of skyscrapers and Times Square we’ve come to expect from Hollywood and Woody Allen, but nor is it the filthy New York of slums and the underworld we’ve come to expect from exploitative genre films and documentaries. It’s somewhere in between – the space where real people live and struggle, not as character types but as regular New Yorkers. The Pakistani Americans are not chained to their given ethnic ghettos, but instead, they move: they take subways, they commute to work, they crawl across town trying to hustle a living, have fun, or raise a family. They see the cramped, cracking apartments, but also the glitzy ones. And unlike the stereotypical Manhattan drama about minorities, Man Push Cart has surprisingly no violent crimes, but only the residue of dissatisfaction and loneliness left remaining from unfulfilled dreams, and only the suggestion of racial and class violence bubbling below a very normal surface.
This spatial reconfiguration of New York City is enhanced by Bahrani’s use of the telephoto lens, which stacks the three-dimensional space in front of the camera such that we see more depth of the city before us. It makes Ahmad’s slow trek pushing his cart seem all the more strenuous. It also forces the camera to be placed further away from the characters, allowing pedestrians and cars to pass by in front of the action. This technique lets the film shoot high-class locales but simultaneously the working class which inhabits the same space. The overlapping frames of action also give the film a texture which represents its improvisatory quality as well as its visual elegance.
The use of the telephoto lens is also a function of the film’s meager production schedule and budget. According to an article by Roger Ebert, many of these shots were filmed secretly in the street with real, unsuspecting New Yorkers. The lens allows the filmmaker to hide the camera far away from the characters, letting the film to play out in real time and space.
Man Push Cart is surprisingly modest in its presentation; never do the techniques scream at you as the new trademark of independent filmmaking. Here, style complements content because the style reflects the spirit of the content. Ahmad wades through traffic to make a living, and thus so does the camera. It’s not in-your-face naturalism, but actual naturalism. As such Man Push Cart is a return to American indie roots, at the same time that it invents its own techniques to engage intimately with the harsh geopolitics of contemporary New York’s everyday ground-zero.
Official site: http://www.noruzfilms.com/films/mpc.html
Date Posted: 9/19/2006