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{Immigrants} whisper in a dark parent bed, that dark parent fear. Will they like
our fine American boy, our fine American girl?’- From “Immigrants” by Pat Mora
Theatres are currently showing a third Greek wedding film, a new Ninja turtles
origin film (which to be fair opened to positive reviews) , a fourth
Expendables, and Meg 2: The Trench, a sequel to a film about a killer
prehistoric shark. And In the near future we will also see the release of a new
entry in the Hunger Games series as well as the Captain Marvel sequel, The
Marvels.
But for viewers seeking originality and who want to escape the constant
onslaught of sequels, franchise films and remakes, Fremont (which opened to
considerable acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival) is an excellent alternate
choice. For good and bad, this deadpan absurdist minimalist film looks and feels
different than everything else that’s playing anywhere.
The film is named after a quiet little town in the San Francisco bay area where
it is set in which according to the film not much ever occurs. The area is known
as “the hardware side of the bay.” As it happens the real town is filled with
many immigrants. The film has a great sense of place and it makes you almost
feel like you are visiting a new territory in person. It also makes you
empathize with the plight of the immigrants and (like the Pat Mora poem and the
R.M.N.
film) their fear of not being able to assimilate.
Fremont is a humble, beautiful little film about small everyday pleasures like
blind dates, gossip between friends, and the modest satisfaction of working at a
job that you like which allows you to get by.
The new film also has a Chicago connection because it features one of the first
major film roles from, Jeremy Allen White, who was featured in Shameless and is
currently in the acclaimed Chicago based show The Bear (on Hulu). His character
appears to have a crush on the female lead and shows up towards the end in a
small but memorable role,
The film was directed by Balik Jalili, an Iranian immigrant who did an acclaimed
short and several well received full length features (Frontier Blues, Radio
Dreams and Land). He obviously related to the story about a Middle Eastern
immigrant who goes overseas. The film is about Donya, an Afghan exile living in
a little town in California where she can be anonymous and keep away from death.
She is played by Anaita Wali Zada, a real-life Afghan immigrant who is acting
for the first time in a film, and she is perfect for the role. Her face is a bit
blank and hard to read. She comes off like someone who is detached and has gone
through some great trauma or is hiding her emotions and feeling numb.
Early on Donya gets in to see a psychiatrist by basically staring the
receptionist down and making persistent demands of her to see the doctor despite
the fact she has no appointment. Donya wants sleeping medicine because she has
had trouble relaxing at night perhaps because she is suffering from
post-traumatic stress disorder from her days when she worked as a translator for
the Afghan troops in a war. The shrink hypothesizes that she is suffering from
survivor’s guilt which prevents her from sleeping. Because of her work helping
the troops she was granted a special visa and she decided to leave and live in
the US and she narrowly escaped before the Taliban took over.
Although she is withdrawn and timid seeming she has a kind of quiet power and a
great clarity of purpose. Soon she gets a job writing fortunes for cookies in a
Chinese restaurant. Although the job sight is not close, it at least allows
Donya to escape her dreary town. The only problem is that the owner’s wife
resents that he gives the young woman his attention and she tries to get Donya
fired,
Her doctor (Greg Turkington) is quite eccentric. He is completed obsessed with
the book, White Fang by Jack London. He also makes a kind of weird art project
using fortunes that he wrote that were obviously done to impress his patient.
Many of the men in the film seem to have crushes on her but she usually is
uninterested in reciprocating. But she probably thinks that that she should not
be concerned with romance while her countrymen are still dying in her native
Kabul.
Like the poem,” Immigrants” by Pat Mora, the film shows some of the negative
sides of coming to the United States. Even though she has Afghan neighbors, she
is highly isolated and her only apparent friend is another Afghan woman. Not
everyone welcomes her with open arms. Her friend’s husband hates her for what
she did in the war (collaborating with Americans) and he refuses to even speak
to her.
Not everyone is mean to her, and a few people try to engage her in conversation.
She hangs out in a bar where a man constantly watches TV and tries to befriend
her. He says in a matter-of-fact manner “I can’t tell if this series is
interesting or my own life is uninteresting.”
The film is shot in gorgeous black and white with excellent cinematography by
Laura Valladao, and it looks glorious though not contemporary. The lighting and
slow pacing make the film reminiscent of early 80s Jim Jarmusch films like
Stranger than Paradise and Down by Law as well as the later Patterson.
In the future, Fremont could go down in history as either a classic or a not
totally confidant first work by a major film maker who went on to better things.
I suspect it will fall somewhere in between. Although I liked the film very
much, it feels slightly unfinished and it seems like it was made by a director
who is finding his niche or way.
But it manages to achieve a kind of splendor in its celebration of the everyday,
the banal and little, tangible pleasures. But for someone who has gone through
terrible events this life could seem like heaven. Fremont is a fine and special
film made of all the parts most films would probably leave out and it may stay
in your memory longer than the typical big event films.
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