Babak Jalali
Fremont

THE REVIEW

In the metropolitan heat of this August in Milan, to avoid staying home alone in my underwear sitting on the couch just like the protagonist of Dalla's "Disperato erotico stomp", I dashed into a cinema where a film titled "Fremont" was being screened. Perhaps I was intrigued by the film's black and white poster, or perhaps the name of the Iranian director who emigrated to Great Britain piqued my interest. The fact is that I found myself watching a film that can capture the attention of a viewer who loves a certain kind of cinema with a subtle and measured style, in line with certain authors like Jarmusch and Kaurismaki. Directors, therefore, attentive to the lives of very ordinary people, trying to navigate the flow of History (indeed, the one written with a capital H), finding a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

Here the protagonist is a certain Donya (played by an excellent newcomer Anaita Wali Zaida), a young Afghan woman who, before the Taliban's return to power in Kabul, worked as an interpreter at a US military base. After what is well known happened, she managed to take refuge in the US, specifically in a small town called Fremont, near San Francisco, where most of the inhabitants are Afghan refugees.

To earn a living, the woman works as the author of those messages found in fortune cookies available in Chinese restaurants. Not exactly the best for a woman with a degree in Afghanistan who fled abroad. Add to this that her relationships with her compatriots are not particularly good, and anyway, if you live and work abroad, knowing the local language is not enough to make everything easy. Donya, therefore, experiences firsthand the difficulty of integrating into a new environment, which causes her unhappiness and even insomnia.

She undergoes a series of psychotherapy sessions to remedy her existential malaise, but it is only when she composes a contact-seeking message for friendship (complete with her phone number) on one of those Chinese fortune tickets that a series of micro-events unfold, opening up new horizons. It is enough to keep in mind that a mechanic's workshop can be providential to address the engine problems of Donya's car, as well as to unfold new possibilities in her life.

Without offering further insights into the protagonist's odyssey, the film, shot in bright black and white and with a slightly slow pace yet without being boring, manages to depict the difficult life of those who, for reasons of force majeure, must emigrate and settle in a foreign environment, even if they know the language of the place. You still feel constantly under examination, and as the Doors sang, "people are strange when you are a stranger."

But I would also say that the plot of "Fremont" confirmed to me how, in essence, Donya's vicissitudes are generally a demonstration of the constant difficulty in each of our lives, whether foreigner or native. A continuous quest for acceptable living conditions in a fundamentally absurd and irrational reality. Just to refute some idealistic philosophy ingrained in rhetoric according to which "reality is rational, and rationality is real." But when ever?