Fremont: an Afghan refugee finds a new path as a fortune-cookie writer in this deadpan indie comedy

When Donya, a young Afghan refugee living in the Californian town of Fremont, gets a gig writing messages for fortune cookies, one of her first compositions reads: “The fortune you seek is in another cookie.” The deadpan irony is typical of this understated, fastidiously crafted film by Babak Jalali, whose Radio Dreams (2016) took a similarly wry approach to the aspirational young Iranian diaspora in San Francisco. With Fremont, Jalali has directed an anti-American Dream: an immigrant who has ‘gone west’ with no ambition, a California in which the visual sweep and expanse of highway barely appears.

Instead, Fremont is a small-scale drama of interiors. Although the trauma of Donya’s past reverberates throughout – she worked as a translator for the US military and fled Afghanistan solo – the film’s narrative feels close to the mumblecore comedy of Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, in which the feeling of being lost in your twenties, and the follies of quarter-life crisis, are redeemed by being part of a cultural or aesthetic moment. Donya (Anaita Wali Zada, in an astonishing acting debut) spends her days hand-wrapping fortune cookies at work and idly chatting to her lonely, offbeat-colleague Joanna (Hilda Schmelling); dining at an otherwise empty restaurant, where a TV set plays soap operas on a loop; and asking her well-meaning psychiatrist (Gregg Turkington) for sleeping pills, when he would rather ceremoniously read aloud from Jack London’s novel White Fang. The laughs earned from this assemblage of zany circumstances are slight, but they mark an intriguing move in terms of genre: an indie comedy about twentysomethings whose problems are actually real.

There are times when this set-up feels a bit too smartly devised or obviously ripe for metaphor – when the material circumstances of Donya’s life feel calculated and artificial (you might make up messages for a fortune cookie factory or explicate your suppressed past to an eccentric psychiatrist; what are the chances of both?). But this sense of being constructed is matched by the stunningly stylised visuals from Jalali and cinematographer Laura Valladao. Shot in the squarer Academy ratio and handsome black and white, from which the material minutiae of Donya’s life (the crease of her pillow, the plastic of a wrapper) gorgeously emerge, Fremont favours symmetrical compositions and front-on framing – the film it’s closest to, visually, is perhaps Paweł Pawlikowski’s painterly Ida (2013). Occasionally, this style gives way to free-form, impressionistic vignettes, set to heady jazz, in which Donya smokes, saunters around, looks worried.

This non-naturalistic approach, punctuated by spells that tease greater intimacy with the protagonist, is a brilliant achievement, in real service to Fremont’s themes: it is a PTSD film without night sweats, flashbacks, or blackouts – without plot, in a way, which makes it truer to the structure of this specific kind of anguish. Theorists of trauma commonly characterise it in terms of elliptical memories, suspended action and interrupted silences: Fremont’s cool stylisation and lack of narrative resolution are well-wrought acknowledgements of its protagonist’s condition. Within this remit, Wali Zada performs her affectless role flawlessly. Trapped in an absurd scenario – because it is absurd, to have gone through hell and ended up in a fortune cookie factory in Fremont – Donya is like a judge forced to wear a jester’s cowl, and Wali Zada is unflappable in walking this tonal tightrope.

Jalali’s script, co-written with Carolina Cavalli, scatters references to fortune and chance throughout the film. When probed by the psychiatrist about survivor’s guilt, Donya distils the horror of her evacuation into a doctrine of assigned fate: “I know I am lucky,” she says, “and I know they are unlucky.” Halfway through the film, she breaks this determinism by slipping her phone number into one of the cookies, ultimately leading to a chance encounter with a mechanic (Jeremy Allen White). It offers a conventionally bittersweet moment of connection, just before a climactic moment of bleakly comic humiliation. But Donya’s impassive stare only fully breaks once in the film, and it’s when she watches Joanna do an impromptu karaoke performance of ‘Diamond Day’, a plaintive and twinkling song by Vashti Bunyan. It’s a staggeringly simple and captivating scene that comes out of the blue, in which the camera hovers on Joanna alone. When it finally cuts back to Donya – now tear-stained – it’s like a miracle has happened, like witnessing blood spring from a stone.

 ► Fremont is in UK cinemas now.