FREMONT

Directing: B
Acting: B-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B

There’s a fantastic shot, in the last quarter or so of Fremont, in which the protagonist, Donya (Anaita Wali Zada), is sitting on one of the twin beds in a hotel room, facing a large white figure of a deer, like a lawn ornament, standing on the other twin bed. I really wanted to find it as a still online to use as my image for this review. Alas, I can find no images online of Anaita Wali Zada with the deer.

It was about this point in the film that Fremont finally endeared me to it. There is an oddly deadpan tone to most o this film, directed by British-Iranian Babak Jalali and co-written by Jalali and Italian writer-director Carolina Cavalli. There’s a surprising depth to Fremont that only gradually reveals itself, ultimately rewarding the patience asked of its audience. The almost universally stilted line deliveries take some time to get past.

Donya herself leads a very solitary life, in the Bay Area suburb of Fremont, hence the film’s title. She is among a known community of Afghan immigrants who live there, as Fremont has the largest concentration of Afghams in the United States (a trivia fact not ever mentioned in the film; I looked it up). She works in a “hand made fortune cookie” factory in San Francisco. Another fact the film does not bother to mention: it takes about an hour and a half to commute that distance by train. But, Donya herself confides in a therapist that she took the job to be around Chinese people during the day rather than surrounded by other Afghans all the time.

She’s visiting a therapist, a man played by Gregg Turkington as a vague sort of comic relief, in her pursuit to procure sleeping pills due to persistent insomnia. This is a guy who speaks in deadpan snippets with long pauses, same as Donya, same as Joanna (Hilda Schmelling), her coworker friend at the factory. Nearly everyone speaks the same way, I can only assume the director told them all to deliver their lines this way.

On a day trip to what she thinks is a blind date, Donya comes across a mechanic played by Jeremy Allen White. This is the only truly famous member of the cast, known for both Shameless and The Bear, and as a result White nearly qualifies as an untenable distraction. That said, he’s also the one performer in this film with line deliveries that make him feel like a real person, with a truly naturalistic performance. It only occurred to me just now that this may have been by design: his mechanic character is clearly meant for Donya as a romantic interest, and although the entirety of Fremont is shot in black and white, the contrast is as though Donya were Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, walking into a world of color.

There is something about Fremont that has really stuck with me, and the more I consider the film, the more I appreciate it. I’m still not a fan of most of the line readings, and yet the measured pace really works for it. Even before Donya meets the mechanic, Fremont takes a tonal turn, as she has been hired to write the fortunes for the cookies, and she inserts a secret message into the pile. We get a brief montage of randos reading their fortunes, and they are actually the first people we witness speaking like real people.

Who actually winds up finding the secret message is a sort of plot twist, but it has no bearing on Donya’s fate. In the end, Fremont is a romance, about a lonely Afghan woman with a quiet strength about her, who fled her native country with a dose of PTST. When this movie began, I had no idea I would leave at the end feeling light and uplifted. Fremont is a sneaky charmer.

I wanted to show you the deer, but this will have to do.

Overall: B