Are there any new movies to see? A colleague just asked me that at the office, and I went completely blank trying to name one. Two billion dollars for Barbenheimer tells us that people want to go to theaters, but Hollywood seems mystified about how to keep us all doing so. Today, at least, I have an answer: Fremont, a warmly human and hugely affirming micro indie that opens this weekend in New York and Los Angeles.
Please keep in mind that this is an 88-minute black-and-white film with exactly one star (Jeremy Allen White, in a cameo) that’s as straightforward, aesthetically speaking, as a dress shirt. It’s also my favorite comedy of the year, even though the humor that director and co-writer Babak Jalali mines out of this, his fourth feature, the story of a young female Afghan refugee eking out a solitary existence in the Bay Area, is not of the laugh-out-loud variety. Fremont, in its deadpan, wry, and exceedingly humble wit, reminded me of classic indies that heralded important things to come: Bottle Rocket, Slacker, Down by Law. It’s a story about solitariness and perseverance, told without a trace of sentimentality, and with a generosity of spirit that’ll lift your heart.
We begin in the San Francisco fortune cookie factory where Donya, the 20-something refugee who is as self-possessed as a CEO, works. She seems closed down emotionally, but also companionable enough with a tender-hearted coworker who lives with her mother and is intent on finding romance. Donya can’t sleep, and manages to find her way to a pro-bono therapist, played with inspired comedic timing by Gregg Turkington, who haplessly and movingly tries to help her. But Donya, who is played by a real-life 23-year-old Afghan refugee—the astonishingly poised Anaita Wali Zada, in her first acting role—is possibly beyond help. We learn that she worked as a translator for US forces in Afghanistan and had to flee for her life, leaving her family and her home and everything that gave her an identity. And now she’s all alone in a tiny apartment, viewed with suspicion by fellow refugees (men, mostly), and as haunted-seeming as a person can be.
And yet this movie is buoyed up and up as we spend patient time with Donya, who eats her meals at a local Afghan restaurant, where the waiter watches soap operas with her, and at the cookie factory, where Donya gets a promotion and begins writing the fortunes herself. Nowhere is Fremont more alive than in the therapist’s office, where Turkington expresses his love of Jack London, his own fascination with fortune cookies, and finds himself, in his effort to draw Donya out, emotionally unmoored.
The lesson couldn’t be more obvious. We all need connection, companionship, love—things sought for and not quite found in the arid, quotidian existence of Fremont, California. But lest that seem depressing—remember, this is all in black and white!—let me assure you that Donya, in the film’s lovely final act, finds her way to a car mechanic played by White, who is as lonely as she is, and in their immediate, low-key chemistry, as downplayed as everything else is in this humble movie, Donya’s ghosts float away and something like hope shines in. The final scene, washed in California sun, suffused with longing and the hope of romance, is straight-up beautiful—as graceful and luminous as a photograph by Atget. An amazing thing to watch.
