The Lonely and Endearing Wander through Fremont
Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) used to translate between the U.S. Army and her Afghan countrymen. Now, she writes fortunes for cookies in a San Francisco factory. Always a practical middleman, conveying messages that aren’t hers, Donya’s whole world is the blind leading the blind. The destination is as vague and wanting as the journey. She’s immigrated to a country full of wanderers, all searching for answers, whether that means finding love or figuring out how to embrace their loneliness. In America, her neighbor notices, even the stars don’t stand still. Not like they did in Kabul, anyways. Bumping into a variety of slight yet warm oddballs who’re just as lost as she is, Donya’s deadpan life finds freedom without focus in Fremont.
Directed by Babak Jalali, who co-wrote it with Amanda filmmaker Carolina Cavalli (Jalali edited that movie), Fremont is a series of encounters with strange folks who speak in offbeat free verse and cling to their own ideas about life. Donya navigates a boxy, encapsulating, Jarmusch-like world of people like this, shot as stiff, well-contrasted black-and-white images enamored with the wrinkles and liver spots they notice on older faces. This is where inertia will keep her, until she’s raising a baby, working until she drops facedown on the keyboard, or both. She’s not locked into a content routine like Paterson, but there is a contained repetition, played both for itchy discomfort and quiet laughs.
Donya’s always the only customer eating dinner when a restaurant employee stops to watch his Turkish soaps. She’s always there to lend an ear when her work pal (Hilda Schmelling) recounts blind dates, or karaoke-serenades her with Vashti Bunyan’s “Diamond Day” (a fittingly spare, quotidian track). Their boss (Eddie Tang), like all bosses, loves to think he’s dispensing nuggets of precious wisdom. So too does Donya’s therapist (Gregg Turkington), sometimes as a Jack London conduit, reading passages of White Fang aloud.
These character vignettes compose Donya’s straight-faced life and Fremont’s straight-faced tone. Wali Zada—a newcomer who, in a piece of tragic casting serendipity, joined the movie shortly after evacuating Afghanistan, leaving her family behind—is our viewfinder. Stubborn and quiet, her piercing stares do the heavy lifting as she observes those around her with hints of irony, exhaustion and bemusement. The movie’s camera and actors are mostly stationary, so it’s the depth and not the breadth of Wali Zada’s expressions that guide our own reactions.