‘Fremont’ Review: Rapid Transit

“Fremont” takes its title from the Bay Area metropolis of the identical identify. Often referred to as Little Kabul, it’s house to one of many largest enclaves of Afghans within the United States, with many immigrants gravitating towards it for a way of neighborhood. That’s what Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) is looking for: Community. Connection. Love. These are tough pursuits for anybody in these atomized instances, however particularly for Donya, a younger refugee and former translator for the American army.

Being in Fremont, dwelling amongst different Afghans, isn’t an enormous consolation for Donya. Perhaps as a result of her reminiscences of house aren’t cozy — in actual fact, they fill her with dread and guilt. The particulars of what she left behind aren’t the main target right here. It’s sufficient to know that they maintain her awake at evening; that she prefers the flippantly numbing, Zenlike routine of her unglamorous job at a fortune-cookie manufacturing facility in San Francisco.

The British Iranian filmmaker Babak Jalali captures Donya’s existential plight with the dry, contemplative temper of a movie by Jim Jarmusch or Aki Kaurismaki, each masters of deadpan dramedies infused with melancholia. Shooting in milky black-and-white, Jalali situates Donya in a world of outcasts and loners — individuals disaffected and worn out but additionally able to compassion and alter. Salim (Siddique Ahmed), a fellow insomniac who lives in Donya’s residence complicated, offers her his slot with a psychiatrist, Dr. Anthony (Gregg Turkington), who sees him professional bono.

An appointment isn’t like a film ticket that you would be able to simply hand over to a pal, Dr. Anthony explains, fussing over protocol. Donya persuades him to take her on anyway, starting a collection of droll (if not precisely useful) consultations. After Donya is promoted to fortune author on the manufacturing facility, her boss’s vengeful spouse (Jennifer McKay) discovers that Donya has written her cellphone quantity on the paper in a single cookie. She requires Donya’s firing. Her husband (Eddie Tang) sees it in another way: If something, Donya’s try to achieve out to a different misplaced soul makes her exactly the sort of one who needs to be inventing dreamy maxims.

Jalali and his co-writer, Carolina Cavalli, level to the methods through which bureaucratic rigidity and cutthroat capitalism can cripple us. They cease wanting decreasing the movie to a narrative about social injustices whereas deftly steering away from an excessively cutesy tone and messaging about our shared humanity, or no matter. Expressionistic interludes — shadows mingling on a stairwell wall, a globe spinning at a blurred pace — seize the uncanny nature of social interactions among the many displaced and disoriented.

Jalali enhances this wistful temper with a jazzy rating from Mahmood Schricker, which, pushed by sitar and low-pitched horn, appears to chop by way of the useless air of Donya’s emotionless encounters. If the humor in these moments doesn’t all the time click on, it’s as a result of there’s solely a lot awkward-giggle mileage in Jalali’s drawn-out takes of two individuals speaking face-to-face.

A primary-time actor who fled Afghanistan in 2021, Wali Zada emits a pure heat and poignancy as she delivers deliberately vacant line readings. This flattens among the wryer scenes however makes Donya’s measured expressions of longing and hopefulness sing. She’s what makes the ultimate act — which contains a solitary mechanic performed by Jeremy Allen White (of “The Bear”) — so transferring and romantic. Jalali maintains a mysterious ambiguity, however Wali Zada conveys what issues: Donya has discovered someplace she needs to be.

Fremont
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters.