Man Push Cart

2005 drama

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Man push cart.

I planned to watch this during my famous "man" movie streak and then again during my New York Movie Fest, but I didn't end up watching it for either. Ramin Bahrani directed that short film about the plastic bag that sounds like Werner Herzog that I wrote about a few weeks ago when I said I was going to start watching and writing about more short films and then didn't. My wife frequently shows me these "Humans from New York" posts on this Facebook thing she follows where a random human in New York gets a chance to tell his or her story. This kind of feels like a 90-minute version of one of those. You feel sorry for the protagonist and you really feel his plight as an apathetic camera follows him around for a few days while he befriends a guy, meets a girl, and pushes that cart around like he's Sisyphus perpetually pushing his rock around. You feel it because of the minutiae of it all. You see the guy preparing the little paper cups of tea multiple times and all those extended scenes where he struggles with that cart, mostly pulling the thing despite what the title of the movie wants you to believe. The guy's backstory unfolds slowly, these little pieces of the past of this guy that you don't really have any reason to care about until you realize that he's a human being. Like the best character studies, this one has a character who deepens as his story goes. Not that there's a tremendous amount of story here. We wouldn't want our character to get bogged down by plot, after all. I like that Bahrani doesn't feel the need to tell anything resembling a nice tidy Hollywood story. Things end unresolved, loose ends like tea bag labels. It's probably up to the viewer whether or not the resolution (well, "ending" is probably a better word for it) is one of hope or despair.