Film Review - Fremont
Images courtesy of Mushroom Studios.
Movies that manage to make suburban America feel detached and alien are a treat. Western cinema tends to normalise, even romanticise the everyday lifestyle of its average viewer – so what does it look like for a film to dispense with that? Fremont, opening in Australia cinemas on May 2nd, is an Afghan story – that comes to us from an Iranian-British director – but it’s a film about the experience of life in America. Babak Jalali (who didn’t just direct but also edited and co-wrote the film) channels an outsider perspective on everyday working-class life in Fremont, California: the Bay Area locale from which the film derives its title.
That outsider is Donya (Anaita Wali Zada), an Afghan refugee whose youth working as a translator for occupying US armed forces has been replaced by suburban life, and a glamourless but pleasant-seeming job in a fortune cookie factory. Her boss is a kindly Chinese man who wants to nurture, to incubate her potential: he has his eyes on Donya to move up from cookie assembly to replace the fortune-message writer. Donya’s workplace exposes her to the American 9-5, to her coworker Joanna’s stories of a dramatic love life and an overbearing mother, to the comfortable ennui of menial labour. Everything would be, if not wonderful, then at least fine – but she can’t sleep.
Seeking a prescription for sleeping pills, Donya sees a psychologist (a tongue-in-cheek Gregg Turkington) – another ubiquitous aspect of modern Western living. Jalali’s framing in Dr. Anthony’s office is clean, geometric, and fits easily into the film’s black-and-white, square-aspect-ratio cinematography. Donya appears more than ever to be boxed in, and despite Dr. Anthony’s amusingly awkward demeanour, being confronted by his questions forces her to reckon with guilt and trauma that she carries with her from home.
But this is not a trauma narrative – the overwhelming tone in Fremont is one of quiet patience, letting life roll by and trying to enjoy little things as they appear. Though Donya is solitary and reserved, she’s also smart and independent. “I don’t spend much time thinking,” she tells Dr. Anthony, and when he asks her why, she deadpans “too busy with my social life”. The film it most recalls for me, with its tone and relaxed pace, is Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson. That film is a love story, however, and though Donya doesn’t have a serene longtime partner like Adam Driver’s Paterson, in the film’s back half she does start to zero in on romance as something she could be missing. A middle-eastern restaurant owner, something of a confidant, reminds Donya that her “heart can skip a beat” for someone still – and that person doesn’t have to be Afghan, either.
On a whim Donya puts a message in a fortune cookie, and eventually we meet the film’s biggest star. In the final half hour, Jeremy Allen White appears as a generous, archetypally decent auto mechanic who looks at Donya like she was sent to save him (no wonder Allen White gets the “and…” title card in the credits, his eyes are basically a special effect). Jalali’s grasp of on-screen romance is just as restrainedly powerful as his realisation of loneliness, and the film concludes on a beautiful note of promise. Fremont isn’t a thrilling film, and perhaps one that requires an eager mood, but you could scarcely imagine leaving the cinema without a sense of distinct peace.
Fremont is screening in cinemas from Thursday the 2nd of May. For tickets and more info, click here.