It’s a Lonely World After All
Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative. However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, but better options are on the horizon. (Note: Anything in bold blue below [some may look near purple] is a link to something more in the review.)
My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the same name)
Fremont (Babak Jalali) Not Rated 92 min.
Here’s the trailer:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size;
activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy). To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
(No, this isn’t Ethel and Lucy at the chocolate factory, but there is some humor in Fremont.)
What Happens: This is a unique story about Donya (Anaita Wali Zada), a young-adult-female-immigrant from Afghanistan (worked there as a translator for U.S. military forces against the Taliban) now living in Fremont, CA (San Francisco Bay Area, between Hayward [where I live] and San Jose; a city with a large South Asian population), working in a fortune cookie factory in Chinatown, San Francisco, with little money, no friends (except Joanna [Hilda Schmelling]—on the left in the photo above—her cookie-baker co-worker; Salim [Siddique Ahmed], a fellow-Afghan in her apartment building; and Suleyman [Timur Nusratty], a waiter [maybe owner] of an Afghan restaurant which she frequents, watching Afghan content on their TV), very little indication of what might lie ahead for her.
However, Donya takes a chance for something different, shows up one day instead of Salim to meet with psychiatrist Dr. Anthony (Gregg Turkington), refuses to abide by rules of not allowing a new patient to simply slip into a missed-appointment when there are others on the waiting list, so he, for some reason, agrees to meet with her on a regular basis, trying to help her out of her malaise about her current dead-end-life where she has no connection with anyone back in her home country (had no social life there either; translators were even considered traitors by some other Afghans; she was also shunned by other translators because she’s a woman; now she has a bad dose of survivor’s guilt akin to PTSD, leading to insomnia, because she was one of the lucky few to flee her country 8 months ago when the U.S. pulled out as the Taliban stormed in), has no interest in meeting random people in the U.S. (Joanna tries to get her to go with her on a double blind date [sounds like some kind of a controlled psych-experiment, but that’s not what I mean], Donya refuses; Joanna later says she’s getting tired of the blind-date-routine herself), has little hope of anything getting any better. Dr. Anthony has an odd reply to her situation, though, noting his favorite story of a refugee is Jack London’s book, White Fang (1906), about a wolf, which doesn’t help Donya much. To her surprise, though, a minor change comes when the woman at her cookie factory who writes the fortunes for the snacks suddenly drops dead so Donya’s given her job, with clear restrictions on what kind of advice she’s to write for these little dessert inserts from her boss, Ricky (Eddie Tang). Donya does her best.
Nevertheless, at one point in deep frustration with her circumstances she puts her name and phone number on a fortune, although she gets no replies. There’s not much other plot here (not a negative comment, as this slow-moving-story’s rich in nuanced-character-observation, making it a marvelous pleasure to watch) except Donya is headed to some event (I forget what, as I was somewhat distracted by pain in my getting-closer-to 76-year-old knees when I watched it as I aided my situation with one of my high-octane Long Island ice teas, so while I enjoyed the film as a whole experience some details slipped by, with little help this week from Internet summaries or other reviews) in Bakersfield, CA (a couple of hundred miles from the Bay Area, in the considerably-warmer, more-conservative bottom of the San Fernando Valley; if you’d like a bit more insight into its culture, here’s a useful song, "Streets of Bakersfield", sung by Buck Owens). On the way she needs some minor car repairs, stops at a small maintenance shop, has minimal conversation with lone mechanic Daniel (Jeremy Allen White), goes to a nearby-café for lunch (he comes in too, as it’s his regular dining location), they exchange a few pleasantries until he leaves, after admitting he’s chatty because he has no one else to talk with, is considering hiring a helper mainly for some conversation; he also charges her nothing for the repairs (seemingly in respect of her immigrant status), says that’s the case for any other work she might have done there. ⇒She then goes to a plant nursery to retrieve a small ceramic deer her boss ordered, which is still here because the boss didn’t want to pay the delivery charges to get it to S.F. However, Donya drives back to the mechanic’s place, gives the deer to him as they stumble through some further limited chat (the last 15 min. or so here almost plays like a silent film) although you can tell some flirtation’s beginning to emerge, then in the last shot we see her as we’re also looking past a fence while we hear a train going by in the distance.⇐
(Donya says: "What the hell is all this ⇩ about? He’s supposed to be reviewing my film! Damn!")
So What? In that last week contained a good number of time-intensive-this-and-thats, I had an opportunity to watch/review only 1 choice for this week. Looking back over a short list of streaming possibilities I keep I saw 3 potential choices: Fremont, Bottoms (Emma Seligman)—teenage girls who start a self-defense-club in order to attract a couple of cheerleaders they have crushes on—and Pain Hustlers (David Yates)—a sleazy-pharmaceutical-company pushes opioids on unsuspecting customers. Fremont’s quite solid with the CCAL (more on that soon), Bottoms is as well (Rotten Tomatoes 92% positive reviews, mostly responding to the raunchiness; Metacritic 77% average score, also big interest in questionable-taste-humor), although Pain Hustlers is clearly in OCCU territory (RT 24%, MC at 44%, all agree the script doesn’t support the cast very well)—yet I still had some interest just for the compelling-ensemble: Emily Blunt, Chris Evans, Andy Garcia, Catherine O’Hara, a group I’d probably be happy to watch even in a lousy movie—so I turned to my insightful wife, Nina, to see what she’d be most interested in. After looking over some reviews she voted for Fremont, which was enough encouragement for me, especially because I’d say Bottoms sounds too much like Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) set in high-school with R-rated comedy intended to ease up response to the violence (though don’t be surprised if I end up reviewing it soon if better options don’t emerge) while Pain Hustlers also apparently tries to put a funny face on deadly-serious business, which I’ve already had serious-immersion about in Dopesick (2021 Hulu streaming series) about the Sackler family’s Purdue Pharma and its OxyContin drug, along with a current Netflix streaming series, The Fall of the House of Usher, also about a corrupt, family-run pharmaceutical company, with each of the 8 episodes variously, loosely inspired by the writings of Edgar Allan Poe.
(One example of the marvelous cinematography throughout this film.)
With such backstory now behind me (Donya's finally at peace, I hope), what I found most appealing about Fremont is not that it easily connected me with the region where I live. In fact, except for quick shots of the Fremont BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station and some regional highway driving with familiar-looking-hills in the background I couldn’t visually connect what I saw on screen with Fremont or San Francisco because most of what we see—despite cinematographer Laura Valladao being a Fremont native (who provides us with consistently-fascinating-imagery, as evidenced just above)—could easily be anywhere, especially with the “action” (which never moves very fast) being shown in mid-shot interiors or closeups on an actor’s face looking into the camera as we’re being drawn into a semblance of the conversation the characters are having (further, director Jalali is British-Iranian so I don’t think there’s much connection to suburban northern CA from his perspective either [I guess?]).
None of this non-connection to the location of Fremont (as I see it) is a problem, though, because this story’s not about a geographic area (except as Donya sees herself disconnected from both her homeland and new country) as much as it’s a subtly-engaging-character-study setting up a situation for our troubled-protagonist, gives her little help for her problems from the few she knows (Joanna, Dr. Anthony, Salim, Suleyman), only hints there might be better days ahead with Daniel, so, as is the case with what I call successful Theatrical Realism films (where the direction of the narrative is clear, though the conclusion might be ambiguous as we learn more about the people involved than the events they encounter) we get an intriguing glimpse into Donya’s life without seeing any of the more-dramatic-aspects of her world back in Afghanistan nor knowing what will happen beyond what little we’re shown. Such a limited framework could prove to be boring, too little to draw and hold our attention, but that’s not the case here as Fremont focuses on a complex character who shows us just enough of her unresolved situations to encourage us to learn what we can about her, surmise more as we become “ghost writers” of additional-yet-unseen-scenes. Another intriguing aspect of this film is that it’s shot in black & white, in the old 4 x 3 format, so that it looks very different from what we normally see in theaters or on our home screens, giving us all the more incentive to be attentive to it.
Bottom Line Final Comments: Fremont was released, in extremely-limited-fashion, to domestic (U.S.-Canada) theaters on August 25, 2023, then in mid-September it opened in the U.K. and the Czech Republic, but it’s now down to 3 domestic venues (including 1 in nearby Oakland, CA) with a meager box-office of $266 thousand plus a little more internationally for a worldwide total of $302.3 thousand. Therefore, if I can succeed in my goal of interesting you to see it, you’ll most likely have to turn to Apple TV streaming (or other platforms) where it rents for $3.99 (you have to be an Apple subscriber, $9.99 monthly, but you can also slip in quickly for a 1-week-free-trial which gets you not only Fremont but also whatever else is in their library) so give this film a consideration because I do highly encourage you to see it, a quietly-simple-but-compelling-cinematic-experience. The CCAL agrees with me, with the RT positive reviews at a grand 97%, the MC average score at 72% (which, for them, means “Generally Favorable”). OK, enough chatter from me so let’s just close this out with my usual tactic of a Musical Metaphor to speak one last time to what’s gone before in the above paragraphs. In this case, it was a fairly easy choice of “All By Myself” (written, first recorded by Eric Carmen, on his 1975 self-named album [song based partially on the second movement of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s 1900-’01 Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor]) using Céline Dion’s version of it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGrLb6W5YOM, both because it was such a big hit for her (on her 1996 album Falling into You) and because this song in this particular context needs a woman’s voice to connect with Donya’s situation: “All by myself / Don’t wanna be / All by myself / Anymore / Hard to be sure / Sometimes I feel so insecure/ And love’s so distant and obscure / Remains the cure.” Donya’s tired of being all on her own; maybe Daniel will help her change that, maybe not, so we’ll just have to fill in what comes next, according to our own narrative-sensibilities.
SHORT TAKES
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of the Flower Moon; (4) Problems with Marvel's theatrical and streaming products.
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