“Now is a good time to explore.”
As the camera moves about the interior of a fortune cookie factory, meditatively observing the employees at work, perfectly in tune to the rhythms of the machinery and the sounds (that obnoxiously noisy crinkle of wrappers), it lands on a small slip of paper with that statement printed across it. It’s one of many fortunes we’ll see throughout Fremont— the protagonist, Donya (Anaita Wali Zada), works in the factory, after all— but it clearly and succinctly sets the stage for Donya’s personal journey throughout the film.
Director Babak Jalali’s (who co-wrote the film along with Carolina Cavalli) movie is named for the Bay Area town that’s home to the largest Afghan community in the United States. Donya is a young refugee who worked as a translator for the U.S. government in Afghanistan, and the trauma from that experience lingers with her in her new life in America, as she shuffles back and forth between her apartment in Fremont and her job in San Francisco: the knowledge that some of her people view her as a traitor, the guilt that she wants love and acceptance and a happy life while Afghans back home are suffering daily. Unable to sleep, she finagles her way into a spot with a therapist, Dr. Anthony (Gregg Turkington), whose attempts to treat her teeter on ignorant at best (he compares her experiences as an immigrant to those of the titular dog in Jack London’s classic adventure novel White Fang) and racist at worst, but who gradually teases out some perspective on how Donya’s past informs her present. And then Donya’s boss, the kind and seemingly sympathetic Ricky (Eddie Tang), promotes her from packaging the cookies to writing the fortunes for them, granting Donya another outlet through which to work through her loneliness. Not unlike sending out a message in a bottle and hoping it floats to someone somewhere in the world, one day, Donya types out a note and puts it in a fortune cookie: “Desperate for a dream,” followed by her name and phone number.
Fremont has earned many comparisons to the work of Jim Jarmusch for its deadpan performance styles and wry sense of humor (not to mention Laura Valladao’s rich black-and-white cinematography, which recalls the director’s films of the 80s), and while that’s a worthy comp, Fremont uses humor to exploit the absurdities of a serious situation and messy emotions in a way that is special and all its own. The fraught political climate is perpetually hanging around the edges of Fremont— in the way Donya and her refugee neighbors talk about their homeland, in the way other people appear to perceive them— but the film remains trained on a small group of people, and its sense of humor punctures to the heart of these matters more directly than a drama likely would have. It’s in the hilariously out-of-touch way that Dr. Anthony attempts to connect with Donya. It’s in the way that Donya’s bolder co-worker Joanna (Hilda Schmelling) tries to convince Donya to start dating even as she acknowledges her own personal difficulties and the possible pointlessness of doing just that. And it’s inherent in Donya, and Zada’s portrayal of her, having never acted before appearing in this movie but also having lived through a similar experience to her character, fleeing from her home and settling in America once life under the Taliban became too threatening. There’s a stillness to her face and how she holds her body that’s amplified by Jalali’s spare compositions and static shots, and that makes the tiniest shifts in expression as she listens or absorbs information, or inflection in her line delivery either that much funnier, or that much more heart-wrenching. It can be difficult to deploy those sorts of deadpan readings effectively over the course of an entire film. Zada accomplishes it expertly. It’s always evident when she’s sitting in the uncomfortable tension between doing what’s expected of her and doing what she desires; take, for instance, the near-combativeness between her and Ricky’s wife Lin (Jennifer McKay) at her job, or the admonishments she suffers from the older owner of the Afghan restaurant she frequents as they watch soap operas together.
While Fremont is on one level specific to the Afghan immigrant experience, and on another level specific to the immigrant experience as a whole, it is still, on another level, universal in its piercing portrayal of isolation and desire. These emotions really collide in the third act, when Donya receives a response to her fortune cookie message, but the film ends up not being about that whimsical narrative touch, but about the relationships you form when you least expect it. Donya awkwardly practicing going on a date by herself in her apartment may be sweetly amusing, but it’s the late appearance by Jeremy Allen White as Daniel, a lonely auto mechanic Donya meets while journeying out of town, that really pulls it all together. Maybe it’s just because I’ve had the conversation that Daniel has in a diner with Donya almost verbatim in real life that Fremont’s conclusion avoids feeling too pat. Regardless, Fremont is so effortlessly charming and deeply felt, it’s difficult not to get swept away by the hopeful romanticism of its finale, which ties it all back to that very first fortune: “Now is a good time to explore.”
Fremont is now available to purchase on DVD and Blu-ray from Music Box Films; there are no special features on the disc. It can also be purchased or rented on all digital platforms. Runtime: 91 minutes. Not rated.
Katie at the Movies 