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Babak Jalali (director), Fremont, 2023. 88 min.

“Fortune messages are a responsibility. Consciously, or unconsciously, they are going to act on the flux of things. They shouldn’t be too lucky. They shouldn’t be too unlucky. They shouldn’t be too original. They shouldn’t be too obvious. They shouldn’t be too short. They shouldn’t be too long and so on. You get the point?”
—Ricky, in Fremont, 2023.

Babak Jalali’s Fremont is a series of attempts at freedom, an alliterative echo of which rings through the title, the California city in which the film is set. Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) is an Afghan former translator for the US Military whose presence in the States is proof of her survival, given the likely fate she would have experienced upon the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. While some in her host country might expect Donya to be grateful for not being left at the mercy of a gang of misogynistic homicidal extremists, she has set her sights higher than the humdrum existence she now finds herself in.

^{Donya suffers from insomnia and loneliness}

Donya suffers from insomnia and loneliness, largely brought on by guilt at having to leave her family behind back in Kabul. A fellow Afghan refugee Salim passes his therapist’s appointment on to her but the sessions, with an American shrink (played by Bay Area comedian Gregg Turkington), are a disappointment. He can’t prescribe her sleeping pills until she has attended a minimum number of sessions and, though well-intentioned, he is largely uncomprehending of the situation she has come from.

^{Her day job is writing fortune cookies for a Chinese American-run business}

Her day job is writing fortune cookies for a Chinese American-run business. “The thing about fortune cookies is they can’t be too good or too bad,” says Ricky (Eddie Tang), her kindly employer. Donya has a knack for writing the gnomic inserts but she soon jeopardises her position by giving into a caprice in an attempt to find romance (or possibly simply adventure).

Fremont is particularly realistic in the way it foregrounds the deadening boredom of so many immigrant experiences: the waiting around for things to happen, the tedious process of jobs you have little choice but to accept, the crouched personal space (and headspace) afforded people who have upped sticks and left to a new country. One of the tone-deaf clichés about immigration in Western media—generally uttered by people who have never had to emigrate themselves—is that people leave their home countries “in search of a better life”. The reality is few migrants are under any illusion about the hardship or sacrifices that lie ahead of them, and their decision, if it even is that, to move to another country is often subject to a cold cost-benefit analysis relative to a possibly more pleasant but impecunious existence back home. Few people happily indebt themselves to traffickers for a shot at landing in a wealthy country that may or not pay off, even if they resign themselves to the fact it might be ultimately worth it.

 Jalali’s monochrome deadpan direction has drawn comparisons with early Jim Jarmusch (and it is true that Donya does bear a passing resemblance to Eszter Balint’s breezily world-weary Eva in Stranger than Paradise) but Fremont is a tougher, more melancholic work, even if it is not completely devoid of hope that the grass might one day be greener on the other side.

How to cite: Farry, Oliver. “Inside the Fortune Cookie: Babak Jalali’s Fremont.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 17 Apr. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/04/17/fremont.

Oliver Farry is from Sligo, Ireland. He works as a writer, journalist, translator and photographer. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New Statesman, The New Republic, The Irish Times, Winter Papers, The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly and gorse, among other publications. Visit his website for more information. [All texts by Oliver Farry.] [Oliver Farry and chajournal.blog.]

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