After working as a translator for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) is now staking out a new life in Fremont, California. Donya is exiled from her home and haunted by memories of those she left behind, and Babak Jalali’s wryly melancholic film watches her navigate the eponymous city as she tries to find a new place in the world.
Given Fremont’s monochrome photography and monotone punchlines, the comparisons that the film has drawn to the work of Jim Jarmusch are understandable. Jarmusch has described his 1984 sophomore feature Stranger Than Paradise as looking at America “through a foreigner’s eyes,” which is also the lens through which Jalali views the world of this film. Fremont is rendered as a strange and alienating place but one whose humdrum routines are alive with quirks and curiosities for those whose senses haven’t been dulled by familiarity.
A real-life Afghan refugee, Wali Zada keeps her face blank in a way that makes reading it impossible but trying irresistible. Donya says little and delivers each line in a flattened deadpan, almost tasking others to do most of the talking. Whether she’s engaging with her neighbor (Siddique Ahmed)—a fellow Afghan immigrant who stays up late at night worrying about the stars—or her Jack London-obsessed therapist (Gregg Turkington), these conversations are filled with little insights about the nature of life and why we find it so easy to submit to loneliness.
As she wanders between her job writing the fortunes at a fortune cookie factory and the perennially empty restaurant where she eats dinner, Donya picks up pieces of worldly wisdom along the way. The television in the restaurant is permanently tuned to a Turkish soap opera that the establishment’s owner (Fazil Seddiqui) watches obsessively. “I can’t tell if this series is interesting,” he eventually admits to Donya, “or if my own life is uninteresting.”
Fremont is a film of such quiet musings. It moves slowly, with lengthy pauses allowed to hang in each conversation and long scenes devoted to idle conversation and quotidian activities, like Donya’s work packaging fortune cookies. The jokes are drolly amusing, rarely trying to be more than that. The characters are endearing, even if we never get to know them too deeply. It’s all captured in hazy black-and-white photography and all with the same restrained emotional register, lending the film the ethereal feel of a half-remembered, mostly pleasant dream.
Fremont might play its cards close to its chest, but the film knows when it’s got an ace in the hole and just when to play it. In the final act, The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White appears as Daniel, an awkward auto mechanic who’s every bit as isolated as Donya but a little more forthcoming about his feelings. There’s no sudden gear change to turn this into a swooningly romantic finale, and their brief conversation takes place in the same muted tone as the rest of the film’s dialogue. But Donya and Daniel’s bone-dry exchanges produce an undeniable spark all the same. It’s just enough to leave Fremont and Donya feeling as if they’re looking toward the future.
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