New York movies once took place in steam and noise and grit and traffic. It's rare to see that sort of thing today, but Man Push Cart is a pungent exception. As Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi), a handsome young Pakistani immigrant, drags his coffee-and-doughnut pushcart through the wee hours of the Manhattan morning, the movie immerses you in his humdrum rituals — the lighting of the bagel oven, the flickering exchanges with customers — yet it also makes you aware of the life outside his bubble. In its lonely-immigrant-in-the-big-city way, Man Push Cart is as steeped in the jumbly anonymity of the streets as Taxi Driver was.
The writer-director, Ramin Bahrani, is a natural-born filmmaker who captures how the banal physical details of manning a pushcart could come to define a life. Yet the film's star, Razvi, with his rakish long hair and powerful gaze of broken dreams, cues us to a deeper existence. We learn that Ahmad, despite his current lowly station, was once a pop star in Pakistan, and the movie fills in the missing pieces of his fall from grace. Man Push Cart has a didactic sentimental side; its atmosphere is much subtler than its story, and it uses Ahmad's lost celebrity to squeeze poignance out of a situation that would have been poignant enough on its own. Yet this modern slice of neorealism has been made with a skill, and humanity, that suggests Bahrani may have a Bicycle Thief in him yet.
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