Fremont

Images Courtesy Music Box Films

Review: Fremont                                               8/10 Stars

By Simon McCarthy

What a lovely little film, I was going to leave it at that and just encourage you to go and see for yourself. If you go, you will find yourself strolling in an exotic place, a foreign land. You will smell for the first time a fragrant new spice and then know it, and like all great cinema you will feel grateful to have been led to somewhere unique you could never have found by yourself.  

The film is set in Fremont, California, which is actually home to a giant Tesla factory. This contrasts with the ancient machinery used to slowly make the fortune cookies where we find Anaita Wali Zada playing Donya. She has recently come to the US as a refuge from Afghanistan. Wali Zada is not a professional actor, and she actually did recently arrive in the US as a refugee from Afghanistan. In the movie, her character Donya worked there as a translator for the US military. She is intelligent, educated and is looking for a new life.

The trauma of her recent past doesn’t let Donya sleep all that well. In order to get a prescription for some sleeping pills, she has to sit through several very amusing sessions with the bumbling Doctor Anthony, played superbly by the Australian born Gregg Turkington. But it turns out she doesn’t need the world or herself explaining to her by an emotional child masquerading as a government employed psychiatrist.

Hilda Schmelling plays Joanna  who is Donya’s loyal work friend who advises her in various matters including romance, an area she herself appears to be desperately underqualified in. She does, however, have an unexpected talent we discover later in the film.

The Chinese owner of the Fortune Cookie Factory is Ricky (Eddie Tang). The business was established by his father. He does not see the product they produce as a mere confection or type of edible Christmas cracker  but something closer to a communion wafer, if a misshapen one, able to have a profound effect on the recipient. This engenders a certain responsibility as to the message. The recipe for the message inside the cookie is more complex than the biscuit itself, and certain strictures must be complied with. Messages that are overly pessimistic or unduly optimistic are to be avoided, and so on. The criteria for a successful fortune cookie message, although bounded and to a degree formulaic, does require a seed of creativity, something Ricky believes Donya possesses. She demonstrates this admirably with her first attempt, “The fortune you seek is in another cookie “. Ricky’s belief in Donya makes his mean wife jealous and she contrives to punish Donya.

Donya and her fellow Afghan refugees live in a group of apartments. They have all been pulled from their contexts and put together. It’s like they have been all washed ashore on a long Fremont beach but are too thinly spread out to form their old familiar society,  and know they are just pausing before integration into their new, bigger world.

Donya often eats with an old Afghan cook. He is addicted to a TV soap, presumably on cable and has watched hundreds of episodes. He strongly advises Donya to immerse herself in her new life. She takes his advice; however, this was something she was in the process of doing anyway. The cook finds that by giving her advice, he has shaken himself out of his own routine, and when she sees him the next day he says he has given up watching his soap opera.

The film is shot in black and white and seems to have been processed to give a high contrast effect. This, together with the use of fixed cameras and sparse dialogue, gives the film a very graphic novel feel to many parts of it. Cinematographer Laura Valladao produced the beautiful images, maybe I will ask her if this was deliberate.*

Donya borrows Joanna’s mother's car and heads off on what she expects to be a romantic assignation with somebody who found the phone number that she had hidden in a fortune cookie. Things don’t work out exactly as planned, but she has already lit her own blue-touch-paper** and is eager to be propelled into her own future.

The movie directed by Babak Jalali (Radio Dreams) is at once haunted and haunting, and it has some very funny scenes. All the characters we meet are so well observed, their essential qualities distilled out of them right before our eyes. Whether: greedy, selfish, lost, ordinary, sad, angry, lonely, happy  they are all rendered accurately  and often poetically. This is a beguiling film from a confident hand. Highly recommended.

*I found a rather technical interview that Laura Valladao did with FilmMaker magazine; she goes into the detail of the shoot, lighting, etc., interesting. link below.

       ** The blue touch paper was what you lit to set off a firework, as in, "light blue touch paper and retire".

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