A Mirror Floating in Water

2005 dir. Ramin Bahrani

This is an inspiring movie. It is what the title says, it's about a man who owns a push cart in New York. It is inpiring in the sense that Camus is inspiring. It has an anti-ending and is virtually anti-narrative. The man was once a rock-star in his native country of Pakistan and now makes a living selling bagels and coffee. Unlike so many other movies, this film aviods tender illusorary moments of non-life. This movie is pure life.

The film begins in what could now be considered typical Bahrani-style; a man prepares and washes his push cart and then pulls it out into the empty streets of New York City before sunrise to its typical spot. He prepares the bagels, the coffee, the tea. The days starts once customers start coming and one of them is a fellow Pakinsanian. Later on when this fellow countryman, who's made it quite well in America, recognizes his face from one of his beloved CD's, he begins offering him opportunities to make it back to the stage through his "connections".

Now most films would go in the direction of our hero working hard to in the end achieve his dreams, or in some more drastic direction in which his friend's "connections" are the local mafia and he is going to have to end up killing somebody. This movie is too complex and honest to be either.

As fantastic as our hero's background seems, it is all too humble now and is a telling to American economic challenges. It is a great thing that very little is revealed about Ahmad, or at least is said out loud. There are so many wrong directions this movie could've made, turning into an economic melodrama, a typical inspirational tale, or a lurid love story, but it stands tall in remaining true to its hero and is not about to give itself away to cheap plots. It follows the banal rhythms of life and shows us what we really do. If wasn't such a bad promoter of films, I would simply say that this film is simlpy about a man pushing a cart. Everything else that happens is practically unessential to our character's despair. But who would go see it? Who wants to see real human beings? No, we have to go see the same old films based on the same old method scripts, more banal than any of the shots in this film of Ahmad just pushing a cart.

This film was directed by Ramin Bahrani and he is a revelation in independent cinema. He has seemed to scooped up the medium, already hanging on a cliff, far too tempted to conform to at least some of Hollywood's conventions, and has brought it back to its essentials. In a sense Bahrani has created the American neo-realism. As if some great writer like Hemingway he keeps his scenes as long as they need to be, cutting once it is esstential and the point is made. His camera is constantly alive and yet ever-so subtle. It doesn't jump out and say, "ooh look at me, I can do such stunning camera-work" but rather, it obeys the demands of the characters and is interested in nothing more or less.

Filmmed using entirely non-professional actors, Ahmad Razvi plays himself, and is ever so masterful in his silence. There is hardly any main dialouge in this film (though there is plenty of background chatter), and yet Razvi gives a performance beyond anything in Hollywood, almost without words.

Ahmad is emotionally detached and distant. His life is slowly and undramatically crumbling to pieces. But somehow in the banalities of pushing his cart through the streets, he lives. In the end, we discover what Camus meant in when he said "one must imagine Sysphus happy".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRF1EUFdZow