The myth of Sisyphus ... with cream and sugar
BY MARLI GUZZETTA INDEPENDENT ARTS EDITOR
In Manhattan at least, the shimmer of polished steel is still an emblem of American industry thanks to the street corner food carts that sweeten thousands of morning work commutes with the pleasure of coffee, and maybe a bagel.

"Man Push Cart" writer and director, Raman Bahrani. "What I really don't like is dialogue that has meaning. I like dialogue to be banal, but with a point, because you feel it's the way people are really talking."

The carts (actually trailers) are anywhere from 500 to 800 pounds. This is important to note because pushcart vendorturned actor Ahmad Razvi had to haul one around the streets of Manhattan for Raman Bahrani's "Man Push Cart," playing this week at the Nantucket Film Festival.

It is a film that tells the story of a former Pakistani rock star named Ahmad (played by Razvi)

as he tries to acclimate

financially and culturally as a pushcart vendor in Manhattan.

"Most of the pushcart vendors I met had so many different lives back home - journalists, engineers," Bahrani said of the decision to make Ahmad a rock star. "I liked the idea that he was somebody important in Pakistan, and here nobody recognizes him, he's completely unknown."

In the film, Ahmad has so little, he actually has to pull the cart by hand to his street location and back to its dispatch - a scene that is repeated and seems ever "heavier" as the conflict elevates.

Not only is the character Ahmad unknown and broke, he is also a widower with a son who lives with his maternal grandparents, because Ahmad cannot yet financially support him. The movie follows Ahmad's effort to raise enough money to pay off his cart and then purchase a home in New York that is large enough for himself and his son.

The film's writer and director, Bahrani brilliantly conceived this act of forever pushing (though Ahmad actually pulls) as a reference to Sisyphus - the mythological Greek king who is punished in the underworld with a compulsion to push a rock endlessly up a steep hill, never reaching the top before the rock rolls back down.

Appropriate to this conceit, most of the narrative is told through nonverbal action - pushing, touching, cleaning, saving, etc.

"I'm not a huge fan of a lot of dialogue," Bahrani said. "What I really don't like is dialogue that has meaning. I like dialogue to be banal, but with a point, because you feel it's the way people are really talking."

For this reason, before shooting, Bahrani didn't share the script with his actors - who were often people he recruited on location off the streets of Manhattan.

In a bar scene, Bahrani incorporated a man with a real scar as well as his story of being jumped and slit up the abdomen by men who called him a terrorist.

Nowadays, September 11 is an albatross hanging around the neck of any American film focusing on contemporary Middle Eastern characters - and Bahrani neither ignored it, nor gave it too much time.

"I wanted those feelings to be underneath the film, but I didn't want the film to be about September 11," Bahrani said. "We see Ahmad as a humble person struggling to better his life. This is what matters, not that these people aren't terrorists."

If Bahrani meant his message to be a statement against any preconceived notion, it is the notion that there is no middle ground between being a tremendous success and a tremendous failure.

"There's no middle ground, the same way there's no middle class. Either you're a success or you're a failure," said Bahrani, who is bothered when people call "Man Push Cart" a "small film."

"Somebody called it a small film, and I said 'I don't know what this means. We made a film. And I'm going to project this film tomorrow on a screen that's the same size as the screen for any other film, and it's the same price as any other film.'"

In reconfiguring the Sisyphus myth, Bahrani focused on Camus' essay "The Myth of Sisyphus," which uses the king's story as a metaphor for the pointlessness of human toil but also a defense against suicide - meaning only a man who can truly

accept the meaninglessness (read: impermanence) of his life and life's work can be happy and content.

Just before the film's end, Ahmad almost reaches the top of his own personal hill, and then watches the rock roll back down. Yet he finds a way to be kind to a stranger also having a bad day, who is kind to him in return.

In other words, "How do you look at the world the way it really is and still be content? How do you still be nice to the last person who comes along?" Bahrani said. "It's not that I want you to leave the film feeling really happy. What's important to me is that five days later, you may treat the person who gives you coffee differently."

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