Immigration Tribulations

One of the best of the year, plus cleaning two out of the queue during a free month of Amazon Prime.

FREMONT (A) - Sometimes a movie is so pleasantly perfect that words fail a critic. Just go see it; trust me.

With a heavy debt to the deadpan storytelling and grainy visual style of Jim Jarmusch, writer-director Babak Jalali deftly unravels the story of Donya (Anaita Wali Zada), a refugee from Afghanistan, where she collaborated with the Americans as a translator. She is now in the bland Bay Area town of Fremont, dying slowly of boredom and desperate to make a human connection. She does have interactions -- with co-workers, neighbors, a therapist -- but she yearns for something deeper. 

Donya works at a small local fortune-cookie factory, where she graduates from making the treats to writing the fortunes, which gives her not only a creative outlet to process her emotional issues but also a way to slip in her phone number to whatever lucky soul might find it and contact her. That faux pas will backfire on her. But it will lead to an eventual trip to Bakersfield that offers the hope of a happier future.

Among Donya's acquaintances are co-worker Joanna (Hilda Schmelling), who at one point sings her an old folk tune ("Just Another Diamond Day," below); a cranky Afghan neighbor and his bullied wife; the factory owner (Eddie Tang) who is full of uplifting aphorisms and pithy life lessons; and the proprietor of the restaurant where Donya joylessly eats her dinner every night, joining him in watching a foreign soap opera. Best of all is Gregg Turkington as Dr. Anthony, the therapist, whose alternative methods appear to be self taught (and which revolve around teachings from the novel White Fang). Turkington ("Entertainment") gives this production comedic credibility, serving as the perfect foil for the exasperated Donya. Throughout, Wali Zada, a newcomer, is placid and monosyllabic but barely concealing the roiling emotions within, all suggesting hours of backstory conveyed in a single glance.

Jalali is partial to static shots framing a single character, another Jarmusch touch. The story is paced perfectly over an hour and a half. "Fremont" is co-written by Carolina Cavalli (whose "Amanda" also was released this year), and the script is spare but profound. When Donya has a serendipitous meeting with a brooding auto mechanic (the ubiquitous Jeremy Allen White), the slow grind of life's incivilities suddenly gives way to a glimmer of sunshine out there in California, a land of hope and dreams.

NOBODY'S WATCHING (2017) (B-minus) - Lightweight and uneventful, this earnest film depicts the challenges faced by  an immigrant from Argentina hustling to find work and a sponsor to stay in the United States.  Unfortunately, the main character is a pretty-boy actor who had made a name for himself in Argentina, and it's tough to empathize with his non-grueling existence as a nanny for a friend, among other odd jobs that are not back-breaking.

Nico (Guillermo Pfening) is mostly in denial after, early on, it is clear that the main reason for his move to New York -- a starring role in a Mexican director's independent film -- is falling through and he will be stranded without decent acting work. (It doesn't help that he's blond and blue-eyed and doesn't "look Latino," so he gets rejected at auditions.) Nico jeopardizes his job as a nanny with questionable behavior and soon descends into a decadent lifestyle of drugs and random sexual encounters.

It doesn't help that doors are closing back in Venezuela, too. The show-runner for the popular soap opera that Nico co-starred on had put Nico's character in a coma, though that's not the only reason Nico fled -- there is also a romantic history between him and the show-runner (Pascal Yen-Pfister), who is a closeted husband and father. Much of this movie actually plays out like a soap opera, and not a particularly compelling one at that. The director Julia Solomonoff (writing the script with Christina Lazaridi) is an Argentine who studied film at Columbia, so she surely has crafted a personal tale of an immigrant's life in dog-eat-dog New York. It would help if she gave us more solid reason to care about whether Nico will ever collect a TV show check again.

GOLDEN VOICES (2019) (B-minus) - This comic drama, set back in 1990, never finds an appealing tone as it follows an aging couple whose move from Russia to Israel lays bare the weaknesses of their relationship. It's simply not funny enough to be a comedy or compelling enough to be a drama.

Maria Belkin can be quite captivating at times as Raya, who dodges the mood swings of her surly husband, Victor (Vladimir Friedman), whose disposition is clouded by the fact that he can't get work like they had in Russia -- as renowned voice-over actors who dubbed some of the all-time great films. Raya, instead, gets a job at a call center, and she hides the fact that the work involves phone sex under a pseudonym. Victor eventually falls in with a shady operation that bootlegs theatrical screenings on videotape. If that plot sounds familiar, it's because it strongly echoes a "Seinfeld" episode about Russian pirates. 

Belkin is an aging beauty with an expressive face, in the mold of Katherine Helmond ("Brazil" and TV's "Soap"), and she does her best to wring pathos from her role. But Victor is just a gruff old brute, and when the inevitable climactic reveal comes, it's hard to feel invested in the marriage or to care about how this turns out. Toss in a deus ex machina involving Saddam Hussein's threat of a gas attack on Israel, and things just fall apart at the end.

BONUS TRACKS

This one from "Fremont" plays on a disc while Donya is driving in her car to Bakersfield. It is "Ulu Palakua" by Iwalani Kahalewei:

 

And here is "Just Another Diamond Day" by Vashti Bunyan, from 1970: