Rahmin Bahrani, American neorealist

Rahmin Bahrani is emerging as one of the most interesting young filmmakers in America. His latest -- Goodbye Solo -- may seal the deal, but I haven’t seen it yet, though its reception prompted me to catch up with his first two films. Born in North Carolina and educated at Columbia, he then spent several years in his parents’ native Iran before returning to America to make films. The influence of Kiarostami is evident, as are the antecedent debts to Italian neorealism, Satyajit Ray, and Robert Bresson.

Man Push Cart (2005, MC-71) is a deceptively simple Sisyphean parable of a Pakistani immigrant in NYC, who every day before dawn wheels his coffee cart into traffic and drags it many blocks to its spot on the street, the play of neon reflections on its faceted stainless steel a silent commentary on the man’s dark, drab existence. The repetitive process is rendered with grim lucidity, which is enlivened by chance encounters on the street, with a girl from Barcelona who is filling in at a relative’s news stand, and a yuppie from Lahore who recognizes the pushcart man as formerly a successful singer back in Pakistan. But romance or rediscovery is not in the cards for our hero, just the daily grind of pushing that rock up that hill. It could all be very depressing, but comes across as astringent and bracingly real.

Chop Shop (2008, MC-83) takes place in a realm that seems fantastical but is utterly factual, a little slice of the Third World right in the Big Apple -- Willets Point, a twenty-block area of fly-by-night auto repair shops, presided over by the looming presence of Shea Stadium. We follow 12-year-old Alejandro, an apparent orphan, as he works odd jobs and small crimes to survive, while allowed to live above one of the repair shops. He is thrilled when his 16-year-old sister Isamar comes to live with him, but not so thrilled when he learns what she has to do to get by. They dream of getting a burrito van of their own. Bahrani’s world is not one where dreams have much chance of coming true, but where life is lived as if it’s real, in a savvy mix of exhilaration and despair.