Fre­mont – first-look review

The city of Fre­mont in Cal­i­for­nia has the largest Afghan pop­u­la­tion in the US – some 30,000 call the city home, lead­ing to its affec­tion­ate nick­name of Lit­tle Kab­ul. For Donya (Anai­ta Wali Zada), a twen­tysome­thing trans­plant who moved to Amer­i­ca after work­ing as a trans­la­tor for the US Army in Afghanistan, it’s a strange sort of pur­ga­to­ry. Although she’s friend­ly with her neigh­bours and the local pro­pri­etor of her favourite restau­rant, it’s not some­where she seems to feel par­tic­u­lar­ly at home. A sort of ​‘oth­er­ness’ hangs over the place, where her neighbour’s hus­band resents her in the same way many did back home, view­ing her trans­la­tion work as an act of col­lu­sion with the Amer­i­can government.

As such, Donya seems to feel a lit­tle more com­fort­able at work – she trav­els 40 miles each way to a San Fran­cis­co for­tune cook­ie, oper­at­ed by a kind­ly Chi­nese gen­tle­man and his more prick­ly wife. Her col­league Joan­na (Hil­da Schmelling) is the clos­est thing Donya has to a peer, and for her part, encour­ages Donya to date, sens­ing lone­li­ness in her. Donya is more inter­est­ed in get­ting a good night’s sleep, and after a minor case of med­ical fraud, man­ages to find a psy­chi­a­trist, who she imme­di­ate­ly asks for sleep­ing pills. Dr. Antho­ny (Gregg Turk­ing­ton) is a dili­gent sort though, and coax­es Donya to con­front her mem­o­ries of her for­mer life, as well as the root cause of her insomnia.

Donya is reluc­tant to think about the past but equal­ly seems dis­sat­is­fied with her present life. A new role at work – writ­ing the for­tunes for cook­ies, rather than just pack­ag­ing them – in tan­dem with Dr. Anthony’s ses­sions presents her with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to reeval­u­ate, as Babak Jalali’s film mean­ders through her monot­o­ny in hazy black and white. While the cin­e­matog­ra­phy is evoca­tive of Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Par­adise and Cof­fee and Cig­a­rettes, the script is more sim­i­lar to Pater­son in scope, mean­der­ing through the monot­o­ny of blue-col­lar Amer­i­can life and the found fam­i­ly com­mu­ni­ties with­in it. Donya is a with­hold­ing char­ac­ter, but Zada imbues her with awk­ward charm.

It’s an inti­mate dram­e­dy that strikes a del­i­cate bal­ance between melan­choly and wry­ness (a scene in which Joan­na per­forms a karaōke ver­sion of Vashti Bunyan’s Dia­mond Day should be awk­ward, but ends up unex­pect­ed­ly mov­ing) and while per­haps a lit­tle slight in con­tent, Fre­mont is a styl­ish, sweet evo­lu­tion for Jalali, and a poignant reflec­tion on the mod­ern immi­grant experience.