Ask the Dust

Los Angeles, circa 1934. Arturo Bandini and Camilla Lopez get caught up in a perversely fractured sort of mating dance. Arturo (Colin Farrell) is a pugnaciously aspiring young writer from an Italian immigrant background. Camilla (Selma Hayek) is a fiery little flapper and waitress from a Mexican background.

This flashy and strangely empty film version of John Fante’s semi-autobiographical Depression-era novel is written and directed by screenwriting legend Robert Towne, and as such it makes a modestly intriguing addition to the erratically sustained cinematic evidence of his long-standing fascination with the history and culture of modern Los Angeles (Shampoo, Chinatown, The Two Jakes, etc.).

The passionately conflicted Arturo-Camilla coupling never comes fully to life, at least in part because of the script’s baffling mixture of heroic romance and socially motivated emotional dysfunction. Between the two of them, Towne and Farrell make Arturo more of an asshole and a cad than this screen version can bear, and a parallel leeching of dramatic sympathies occurs with Hayek’s Camilla as well.

The ironic psychology in all that really comes to life only in a secondary story, the semi-unrequited romance between Arturo and the similarly aggressive Vera (Idina Menzel), a flamboyant neurotic from a Jewish background fleeing an unhappy marriage, as well as vague associations with East Coast literary circles and assorted physical afflictions.

The period evocations of downtown Los Angeles and the SoCal desert (all filmed on sets and locations in South Africa) are effective but not particularly memorable. Only Menzel and Donald Sutherland (the latter as a boozy old freeloader) are able to acquit themselves impressively within the film’s oddly reduced circumstances.