Fremont
Filmmaker Babak Jalali honours another director in one of the year’s best films.
Image courtesy of Modern Films
This exceptional work is one in which style and content are in perfect accord. It is set in the Bay Area of California, Fremont being a city close to San Francisco, but the filmmaker is the Iranian Babak Jalali who made his first feature in 2009. That was Frontier Blues which was a small gentle work of some promise but Fremont is a film so wonderfully realised that it is one of the best releases of the year. Indeed, only the way in which it unexpectedly falters in its last stages prevents me from calling it a masterwork.
At the centre of Fremont is a 20-year-old Afghan, Donya, who has arrived in America as an immigrant having obtained a visa to do so after acting as a translator for the US Army in Kabul. We see her both in the apartment block in Fremont where she lives alone (her family are still in Afghanistan) and in a small factory in San Francisco where she is preparing fortune cookies. When an older worker dies she gains promotion and is given the task of coming up with ideas for suitable wording in the cookies. It’s a job which generally goes well, but Donya has difficulty sleeping at night and this leads to a series of appointments with a psychologist, Dr Anthony.
In making Donya its central character Fremont is commenting on the conflicted feelings of immigrants who find themselves strangers in a foreign land compounded in Donya’s case by her feelings of guilt (she is safe but has left her family in a situation of danger and there is also the burden of knowing that back home she is viewed as a traitor for having worked for the Americans). However, while Donya is the crucial figure and is played by Anaita Wali Zada who is herself an Afghan refugee, Jalali’s film, which also brings in further Afghan characters and Chinese ones too, suggests that Donya’s loneliness is a common experience for those who settle in a foreign country. In time Donya is encouraged to seek companionship by dating through the internet and indeed one comes to see Fremont as a work that endorses common humanity by challenging any idea that barriers can be good and by discouraging the notion that people should always stick to their own kind.
The triumph of Jalali and of his co-writer Carolina Cavalli lies in making this material come across in a way that is truly absorbing. He is certainly aided in this by Anaita Wali Zara’s ability to make us identify with Donya through a performance that is so unforced that we feel that she is a real person. Indeed there is a near-documentary flavour to Fremont, a film of lived-in faces, which finds its ideal expression in Laura Valladao’s vivid black and white photography. As it happens Fremont opens in the UK in the same week as Kôji Fukada’s Love Life and that means that in the same week we have two films greatly influenced by the work of my favourite director, the late Yasujirō Ozu. Many of his films including the great Tokyo Story of 1953 were shot in black and white and Jalali not only echoes that but opts to film Fremont in the old Academy ratio.
If those elements in themselves prompt thoughts of Ozu, two other factors underline his relevance. First, Jalali’s film is akin to Ozu’s work in its emphasis on everyday life rather than the telling of a story as such. Until its late stages Fremont simply lets us share details of Donya’s day-to-day existence. Given that context, it is in fact useful that her sessions with Dr Anthony, well played by Gregg Turkington, give the film a sense of progression, of moving forward. Incidentally these scenes also serve as an opportunity to introduce moments that contain their own quietly quirky humour and that’s especially so when Jack London’s White Fang is posited as a role model for Donya. Secondly, Jalali very much limits the amount of camera movement just as Ozu did. But in this case, acting as his own editor, he favours shots which concentrate directly on individual figures thus giving us an acute sense that many of the characters here (not only Donya) are each living in his or her own world and making do as best they can. It is only towards the end of the film that a pronounced camera movement is used, the presence of which alerts us to the importance of a new character being introduced at this moment, a mechanic named Daniel who again is something of a loner. This role is very well played by Jeremy Allen White.
At least one critic I have read has complained that the final section of Fremont is at odds with what has gone before. I disagree. There is certainly a development that might have come across as no more than as conventionally fictional, but Jalali’s film makes it feel like something else entirely. There is a sense here that destiny is involved and had there been any religious feeling to the piece one might have described it as Bressonian. But, while the actual conclusion is what we want, Jalali does draw things out at this late stage with details that get in the way and prevent us from feeling fully satisfied. It’s a pity – but it’s also relatively unimportant since this is a film which, right down to a splendid music score by Mahmood Schricker, uses art to create a world that we can recognise and to which we can relate. It is its own thing, but even then it offers a final shot in the course of which a train passes, a detail which any admirers of Ozu will surely regard as an acknowledgment of the cinema on which Fremont is built.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Anaita Wali Zada, Gregg Turkington, Jeremy Allen White, Hilda Schmelling, Siddique Ahmed, Taban Ibraz, Timur Nusratty, Avis See-tho, Eddie Tang, Jennifer McKay, Divya Jakatdar, Enoch Ku.
Dir Babak Jalali, Pro Marjaneh Moghimi, Sudnya Shroff, George Rush, Chris Martin and Laura Wagner, Screenplay Carolina Cavalli and Babak Jalali, Ph Laura Valladao, Pro Des Rob Riutta, Ed Babak Jalali, Music Mahmood Schricker, Costumes Caroline Sebastian.
Butimar Prods/Extra A Prods/Blue Morning Pictures-Modern Films.
91 mins. USA. 2023. US Rel: 25 August 2023. UK Rel: 15 September 2023. Cert. 12A.
