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Ask The Dust

2006, Movie, R, 117 mins

Ask The Dust: Review

ASK THE DUST
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Thirty years after CHINATOWN, screenwriter Robert Towne returns to the milieu that made him famous — Depression-era Los Angeles — for this nicely played and deeply personal adaptation of novelist John Fante's 1939 masterpiece, Ask the Dust. Like so many transplants before him, aspiring Italian-American writer Arturo Bandini (Colin Farrell) arrived in L.A. dreaming of wealth and fame, but five months later he's no closer to making those dreams a reality than he was when he left Colorado. With little experience with women or life in general to draw on, Bandini prays to St. Theresa for inspiration, but she's yet to come through. With only one published short story on which to rest his fame and nothing to eat but oranges, Bandini is down to his last nickel. He plunks that nickel down on a worn tabletop at the Columbia Buffet, a bar where waitress Camilla Lopez (Salma Hayek) serves him a cup of coffee and curdled cream. A recent arrival from Mexico, Camilla has also come to L.A. with a dream of her own: She wants to meet and marry an American man with a solidly "American" last name so she can become a "real American." Their meeting isn't exactly love at first sight: She's hardly the cool California blonde he's been praying for, and as far as last names go, "Bandini" is really no more American than "Lopez." But the passion between them is undeniable — if they could only overcome the mutual feelings of ethnic inferiority that keep driving them apart. Fante's novel so perfectly captures an author's angst, insecurities and despair that it's long been a favorite among writers as diverse as Charles Bukowski and Towne, who turned to it for inspiration 30 years earlier when writing CHINATOWN. Towne's own L.A. dream of turning the book into a film has been in the works nearly as long, and it's easy to see the novel's appeal: Ask the Dust serves as an elegy for both the city that has long informed Towne's best work as well as his career as a writer. It's not an exact adaptation, but Fante's vision of L.A. as a city of dusty dreams where would-be somebodies relocate only to die unlucky nobodies under a hot sun and a blanket of fog is exquisitely realized by Towne and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel. Occasionally overrated as a writer but consistently underrated as a director, Towne does a marvelous job resurrecting all the seedy jumble of the long-gone Bunker Hill neighborhood — a colorful, largely ethnic section of L.A. featured in countless films from KISS ME DEADLY to ANGEL'S FLIGHT — and L.A. as a cooling melting-pot in which identities clash, and sometimes fall in love, in their mad scramble to fulfill the American dream. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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