The title’s not exactly provocative, is it? It’s just not that sexy, it doesn’t suggest anything really mythical or powerful. All it really seems to conjure is an image of a man. Pushing a cart. To somewhere. And basically, that’s all there really is to Man Push Cart, an independent film now available on DVD. Director Ramin Bahrani has concocted a strange little film that’s kind of desolate and stagnate, yet some how enrapturing and quietly effective. It’s not a perfect work, but considering the script and the subject matter, Bahrani manages to weave something both oddly touching, and weirdly soul-sapping.

The man is Ahmed, a Pakistani immigrant trying to make his way in the Big Apple selling coffee and bagels on a street corner in Manhattan, which would be from the aforementioned cart. His day starts at three in the morning and goes from dawn to dusk when he makes the rounds trying to sell a few pornographic DVDs. And that’s his day. He’s one of hundreds of guys struggling to make ends meet, dreaming of something different, but trapped by the routine and the vague hope that maybe better things are coming. As portrayed in the film, everyday, lugging his push cart up the streets of Manhattan, is a labour of Herculean proportions for Ahmed; one that never ends.

Bahrani relies on the cycle and the repetitiveness of things to get the viewer to feel Ahmed’s pain. Add to that is the performance by Ahmed Razvi who practically wears downtrodden hopelessness as some kind of badge of honour and you’ve got a pretty good dynamic to work off of. What makes Ahmed so pessimistic is merely ever glanced at. It’s presumed that his wife died and that his son ended up in the care of his in-laws sometime afterward, but the specifics are unfortunately never given. And this is where I get into some of the problematic stuff with the film: is the film trying to let us into the life of the street corner coffee vendor, or is trying to reinforce clinical detachment effect: seeing someone everyday, but knowing nothing about them.

Of course, the film would get especially dull if they same sequence were repeated again and again, thank you very much Vantage Point for proving that ably last year. Ahmed, it seems, was a pop star of some renown in Pakistan, the Pakistani contemporary of Aaron Carter perhaps? Or Hanson? The guy doesn’t look that old. Anyway, Ahmed meets a fan that throws him some work and gets him thinking about putting his musical career back on track. That, and a flirtation with the Spanish girl that works a nearby newsstand, has Ahmed thinking life might be going his way. Silly Ahmed. Does the universe sometimes conspire to keep certain people down, or is that just the nature of life and society? Kind of philosophical, I know, but in this film questions are only raised.

Before writing this review, I was reading some of the online feedback to this film, which, by in large, was mostly of the “waste of time”/“nothing happened”/“what’s the point” variety. Waste of time? Not really. Like I said, the repetitive nature of the story had a kind of hypnotic effect, on me at least. There’s something about witnessing another person’s tedium that soothes the part of you that feels stuck in natural. Nothing happened? That depends on your perspective. On a day-to-day and a week-to-week perspective it appears that nothing’s happening with us, but we’re changing all the time in subtle ways. At least this filmmaker had the patience to realize that a life change is a process, not a sudden burst. And perhaps that’s the point; those expecting a sudden alteration to the pattern are bound to be convinced that nothing changes. If nothing else, Man Push Cart reinforces that life’s in the details.