FREMONT - Mark Reviews Movies

Fremont, Music Box Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 24, 2023

A sweet and gentle film about lonely and wounded people just looking for comfort and company, Fremont does quite a bit with very little. Primarily, it's the story of Donya (Anaita Wali Zada, in a compelling debut performance), an Afghan immigrant who formerly worked as an interpreter for the United States military.

She now lives in the eponymous California city but commutes almost every day to a job in San Francisco. It's not that she doesn't like Fremont. It's just that, as she tells a psychiatrist, Donya starts and ends every day by seeing fellow Afghan immigrants, and she simply wants a little something different in the middle.

Almost certainly, there's a lot more to her choice than that, and one of the reasons director Babak Jalali and Carolina Cavalli's screenplay comes across with such honesty is that it allows its characters to withhold, fib, and talk around the things that matter most. We don't need to hear these things directly. We just need to know they're the truth and that, with that truth, comes a lot of unspoken pain.

Lest that make the film sound severe and dour, it's far from that. These characters may be hurting in ways that, well, hurt too much to acknowledge, but first and foremost, they're ordinary people, trying to get through each day with a little less aching and bit more hope than that with which they started. Some of that comes through some big decisions, such as Donya's choice to see a therapist to help with her insomnia or the road trip that serves as the final act of this low-key story.

Most of it, though, is in the little things—a pleasant conversation during a lunch break at work, a late-night phone call from a friend and co-worker whose trivial observations about bed size communicate something deeper, a boss who believes there's something within Donya that she can't even perceive, some talk about a TV soap opera with an old man who appreciates the company but wishes this young woman would find a more age-appropriate dinner companion. Every character here has something—some spark of compassion, eccentricity, wisdom, or all of those things and more—that speaks to some level of depth and decency. Even the closest the film comes to having a villain is someone who intentionally or accidentally sets Donya on a different path. Beyond that, the possible antagonist is married to the kind boss, so she can't be all that bad.

Shot in black-and-white and within the moody confinement of a boxy frame, the film does simply follow Donya, who has come to the United States from a visa for her translation work, as she goes through a series of regular days, broken up by some mounting changes in her life. The little backdrop we do learn from the start is her previous role in Afghanistan, where she hoped to leave but now has to deal with leaving behind her family in a Taliban-controlled country. She can't sleep, either, but Donya insists to her neighbor Salim (Siddique Ahmed), who smokes with her on the balcony of the apartment complex before and/or after his night shift, that it has nothing to do with her family or her past.

She offers the same line to Dr. Anthony (Gregg Turkington), the psychiatrist she goes to see for a prescription for sleep medication (Salim gives her his appointment card, because he's convinced he doesn't need the sessions). The good doctor, who takes his time to reveal some thoughtfulness and care after initially coming across as stuffy and incompetent, becomes one of the central relationships here, as does Donya's bond with co-worker Joanna (Hilda Schmelling), who lives with her mother and tries to convince her friend to join her for a double blind date, and the support Donya receives from her boss Ricky (Eddie Tang).

She works at a fortune cookie factory, by the way. It's just an amusingly enough on-the-nose job for a character in search of some kind of meaning that we know Jalali has a light tone in mind for this material. The boss' wife and business co-owner is Lin (Jennifer McKay), who does doubt and resent Donya for whatever reason, but it gives us one of the few scenes that exist outside of the main character's perspective, in which Ricky explains that he trusts Donya to write. She has memories, after all, and people with memories have wisdom. What kind of memories does this man possess to get at that idea so precisely, as well as so accurately about Donya?

The film is filled with that sense of lives being and having been lived. That's most noticeable and notable for Donya, whose constant insistence that she doesn't feel guilty or anxious about leaving her family in Afghanistan tells us exactly the opposite. That feeling, though, also extends to Joanna, who revels like a kid at a sleepover when her mom is out of town for a night, and to Dr. Anthony, who reveals his admiration for people in Donya's position by way of his work and some wellspring of emotion when he details his love for Jack London's White Fang.

Fremont builds—to the degree something this relaxed can—toward that climactic trip, where a random stop and a chance, pleasantly awkward encounter with Daniel (Jeremy Allen White), who's also alone. The whole exchange feels momentous, not on account of any revelations or declarations, but because of how we see Donya fibbing and changing her mind about something as relatively insignificant as coffee. It really is the little things, isn't it?

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