Ask the Dust

Robert Towne's obvious love affair with John Fante's Depression Era novel, ASK THE DUST, is evident throughout this somewhat over-long film. While the story is a bit clumsy and self-indulgent with so many sidebars that the momentum of the movie gets bogged down in the telling, there are enough fine attributes to make it a recommended evening of reminiscence about Los Angeles, the City of the Angels in the 1930s.

Arturo Bandini (Colin Farrell) narrates the tale of a lad from Colorado with one published story in a magazine edited by H.L. Mencken who moves to Los Angeles' Bunker Hill apartments to write his big novel. The city of LA has never seemed so strange as it seems with Caleb Deschanel's magnificent photography outlining a city filled with dust blown miscreants - people with dreams at varying stages of dissolution. Arturo quickly becomes penniless, is pestered for rent by landlady Mrs. Hargraves (Dame Eileen Atkins) and for handouts by drunkard Hellfrick (Donald Sutherland), and still a virgin he plies his vision as a writer in a local café where he encounters the beautiful Camilla (way too much of a play on the character of Dumas' 'Camille'...). The two play a battle of wits and insults to cover their apparent infatuation with each other: Mexican Camilla is looking for a wealthy 'white man' to raise her out of her illiterate station and Arturo is looking for a sexual encounter to spur his writing.

During their extended 'courting' Arturo is vamped by Vera Rivkin (Idina Menzel), a Jewish housekeeper with grossly deformed legs who dreams of a man who will call her beautiful, and in a touching encounter Arturo displays the kind vulnerability lying under his rather callous and naive exterior.

Arturo and Camilla at last connect, and in a Laguna beach house they fall under the spell of love, a state that ends tragically, like the dust from the desert winds burying all hopes of the people of Southern California.

The story is a bit clunky and the dialogue feels forced at times but it is always a pleasure to see the work of Farrell, Hayek, Atkins, and Sutherland. The true beauty of this truly beautiful film is in the atmosphere and the mood captured by Towne and Deschanel. Their work offers a mood piece that forgives some of the awkwardness of the threadbare story and shows off the actors well. The film may move a bit too slowly for some, but for others, this is a moment of history well captured. Grady Harp

The book is great, the movie is not. Only the beginning is done well. However, I was fairly impressed with Colin Farrell as Arturo Bandini and thought Salma Hayek pulled off a good Camilla. I was also impressed with the depiction of 1930's L.A. I thought that the environment was pulled off quite well. But then about half way through the movie veers away from the book and it becomes a clichéd and sappy love story. The ending is completely changed and loses everything that made the book great. I really am not sure why such a change would be made, this wasn't ever going to be a huge blockbuster film, so why make such a lousy rendition of Fante's work, that is, why try to give it a typical "Hollywood ending?"

I had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Towne give a talk in Toronto, in which he mused on his long and (mostly) illustrious career. From Chinatown to Personal Best to The Firm, he spouted off anecdotes and insights into Hollywood and the screen writing process in general.

Then the audience was treated to a special preview screening of "Ask the Dust." It would seem that this has been a labour of love for Mr. Towne; one that has been several decades in the making. So in that sense, perhaps this film doesn't merit harsh criticism. The fact that Towne got it made is to be commended.

It's not a bad film, by any right. It boasts two decent performances from its leads Salma Hayek and Colin Farrell, lush cinematography, meticulous period detail and a sumptuous score. All the elements of a great film are there. However, nothing really gels.

My guess is that the source material is the film's ultimate downfall. It's dated, and contradictory. What begins as a pulpy potboiler in the vein of "The Postman Rings Twice" becomes a politically correct tirade against intolerance. Oh, and there's a healthy dose of "La Boheme" thrown in there for good measure.

The first half of the film is intriguing as the characters' motivations are enigmatic and unpredictable. Hayek comes across as a latina femme fatale, while Farrell plays the flawed noirish anti-hero. L.A. itself is a character - one of a city at odds with its surroundings. The description of the sand (or dust) from the desert filling the air is particularly poignant.

Halfway through, the film takes a perplexing turn. Turns out there is no mystery behind the motives of the leads. They just wanted to be loved/understood. Cue Hollywood clichés, and end scene. You can't help but be disappointed.

Perhaps in the hands of a '70s auteur director like Polanski, Antonioni or Bob Rafelson, the source material could have been tweaked or restructured to yield a more surprising and challenging film. I even wondered what the film would have been like with a 70s screen icon like Jack Nicholson or Al Pacino in the lead role.

Is Robert Towne L.A.'s Woody Allen? His portraits of the city are indelible, and one of the chief pleasures of Ask the Dust is the way in which the depression-era City of Angels becomes a character in the film. Ask the Dust is haunted by the notion that L.A. is the place where people come to slowly die in the sunshine and is fascinating as a piece of "sunny" film noir. It also explores themes of racism, prejudice and self-esteem and how they manifest themselves in personal relationships. There's a daring ugliness to the romance that makes the first third of the film especially compelling. The scene where Arturo Bandini and Camilla Lopez first meet is pure cinema and one of the more remarkable bits of mainstream film making I've seen in some time. In its way, it is as sublime as Brassai's photos of café-society Paris. In the work print I viewed, Ask the Dust wasn't able to sustain this opening intensity, but it managed to stay compelling nevertheless. Perhaps the best compliment I can pay Ask the Dust is that it reminded me why Chinatown is such a great film (and the comparisons will be inevitable); while I don't think Ask the Dust is in the same league, it does herald the welcome return of Robert Towne as an artist who understands L.A. by instinct, knows how to tap into Hollywood's rich history, and can deliver a human-scale film with the power to reward and possibly even change its audience.

"I am a lover of beasts and men." So Colin Farrell's writer, Arturo Bandini, reveals his humanistic longings and along the way his inexperience with humans. His love is the Mexican beauty Camilla, played better than Katy Jurado ever could by Salma Hyeck, with whom he fights from the cute meeting to the very end. But it is a love nevertheless, with a strength often given only to those who fight passionately.

This is 1935 LA, land of love and art, with a whole bunch of racism thrown in between the abstractions. Arturo's being Italian throws a certain doubt on whether he could eventually marry this Mexican Camilla. Ask the Dust subtly explores a melting pot of racism, of course including the ever present persecution of the Jews. In fact, no one in the film has found a mate or a home yet anyway, so loneliness and disenfranchisement are always there.

Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel's shots are each a marvel of painterly cinema, just the right brownish, noirish lighting and shadows to create a marginal world of dream and destitution where only love could create wealth. And what a love. These two leads are to the camera born, their dark good looks making them as much brother and sister as reluctant lovers. Farrell speaks almost as if he is narrating, which he does as well; his intonations are weighty in sotto voce, uncharacteristic of the more flamboyant characters he is used to playing. Hyeck has lusty dignity with a spicy stubbornness that makes you believe she is worthy of marrying this gringo and living happily ever after.

But that ending is the clichéd part of the story, as if all stories about writers must end with a tragedy. Towne, however, tempers the darkness with hope, an aspiration in abundant supply in lala land, but the compromised kind reminding us at the end of his towering Chinatown that it's out of our hands.