Ask the Dust
by Robert Towne
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DVD details
Actor: Colin Farrell, Donald Sutherland, Eileen Atkins, Idina Menzel, Salma HayekDirector: Robert Towne
Brand: Ask
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; Spanish (Original Language)
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 117 minutes
Published: 2006-07-01
DVD Release Date: 2006-07-25
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Paramount
DVD Reviews of Ask the Dust
DVD Review: Does the Dust Have an Answer?
Summary: 5 Stars
I must admit that I have not read John Fante's novel on which this movie is based. The big question is, did I need to? Ask the Dust as a movie is a delightful little self-contained drama, almost a melodrama if it had not been changed for ever from being that by its ending. It was a film never destined to be a blockbuster or win a Oscar (if that means much anyway). Nevertheless, it is a work of art and while it may lag in places for those of short attention span, if you stay with it, the film is most entertaining. Colin Farrell is more impressive as Arturo Bandini the would-be novelist than in his flat lead role in Alexander, and Salma Hayek, as beautiful as ever, playing the role of the earthy and highly sexual Mexican waitress Camilla Lopez, whether buck naked in the moonlit ocean, making soft porn love in a seaside cottage or fully clothed shod in native espadrilles serving coffee in a bar, is an excellent actress, something that was not revealed in thinner roles she has played before such as with Antonio Banderas in the mindless but entertaining Desperado romp. To her credit it is hard to realise that Miss Hayek is ten years older than Farrell.
One does not need to be a geographer to learn that the film story based in Southern California in the early 1930s was actually shot in South Africa near Cape Town. This fact is revealed in the ending credits if you care to read them. Maybe it was cheaper to shoot there but more likely it was easier to capture an image of what Los Angeles may have looked like back then than any attempt to produce the film in modern day California. The desert scenes are very convincing even though a pendant might say the vegetation is not quite right, where are the Joshua trees? But that is nit picking.
There are several themes in the film which are not hard to discern. Indeed, this movie is empty of mysteries or surprises. There is much awkwardness in the relationship between two young people who are inevitably attracted to each other and deeply in love, although they don't realise this truth until near the end. They are always at each other's throats almost as if they are struggling to resist the deep feelings they have for one another. The meaning of the "battle of the sexes" becomes very clear. Their relationship is not only complicated by their almost virginal youth and inexperience (inevitably more in the young man than the woman) but by the fact that they both belong to "coloured" minorities; she a Mexican probably with some Indian blood, he of Southern Italian parentage, both with black hair, dark eyes and swarthy complexions. she is a Lopez he a Bandini, therefore both are liable to the open discrimination considered acceptable in the pre-holocaust era.
The youth is an aspiring but not yet successful writer of short stories, with one published in a magazine,who has yet to produce a novel (he can only type 2000 words a day or that's his excuse). He meets the beautiful Mexican girl serving at a slightly down at heel café bar near the gloomy entrance to a highway tunnel in one of the less salubrious parts of Los Angeles. Their first encounter is not encouraging, which leads the girl to say much later in the movie "Why do you have to be so mean when you first meet somebody?"
The theme of race also interferes in their relationship where they sling insults at each other. Camilla, an immigrant, is hoping to become a US citizen, Arturo is already one by birth. They both desperately want to believe in the myth of American equality and in the US constitution which he teaches her for her citizenship exam. She is illiterate, at least in English (hardly the ideal companion of a writer,)so he also helps her in reading English via a children's illustrated book about a dog.
The young man had arrived in LA with several hundred dollars in his pocket, almost a small fortune in those days, but with virtually no income and rather wasteful habits at first so he is down to less than a single nickel (the price of a cup of coffee)when the story begins. He rents a room in a cheap boarding house,whose grimy back abuts on a hillside. His view is of the scaly trunk of an uncared for scraggy date palm dying slowly from the already evident LA pollution. However, the rear window of his room provides him with an escape route from the middle-aged landlady always at the front hall desk who is after him for seriously past due rent. When he arrives in LA- in a flashback- and asks for a room the landlady assumes by his colour that he is Mexican and bluntly informs him that she doesn't rent rooms to Jews or Mexicans but seem reassured when he tells her he is Italian (she probably doesn't know what an Italian is).The old fellow (played by Donald Sutherland) across the way is a down and out who like most of the neighbourhood came to LA seeking success and failed. He owes Arturo some small change but arranges to seduce the milkman so the author can pinch a couple of bottles from the cart while the Milko is occupied. The implication, when the dilapidated alcoholic neighbour appears (though never spoken) is "look at me and what I am now-thus you in time will also become". It is on the day when the old neighbour pays back a nickel debt in coin that the story is launched as Arturo rushes off to the nearby café bar for his long-awaited luxury - a cup of coffee- where he is destined to meet Camilla.
The girl is in a somewhat better position as she has a regular though obviously low-paid job. She runs a 1927 convertible and is apparently supported by the young blond barman Harold. It is unclear what Harold's sexual preferences are and they probably don't sleep together. He is a kind of protector. Camilla reveals to Arturo that Harold suffers from tuberculosis and won't live very long. Unfortunately once this fortuitous piece of information was given I guessed where the film was going and how it would end.
There is one diversion which doesn't seem vitally necessary to the story line when a good looking thirty-something New York City exile pursues the writer. She is a disfigured one-time wealthy Jewess who has been evicted by her husband who could not bring himself to accept her scarred body. She is another LA misfit whose passion serves the young man as a test for his real love for the Mexican girl. The woman is conveniently evicted again, this time from the story itself by her sudden death in an Long Beach earthquake. The scenario of the film is not very complex beyond the battle of the sexes and the need for people- who did not quite fit the contemporary image of the ideal Americana, as fair skinned, blue eyed and blond- to establish an identity as they had wrongly been induced to believe that they were somehow inferior.
Unlike King of the Hill, (itself a movie perhaps too glossy to describe the reality of that era despite the "Hoovervilles" in it), Ask the Dirt is not a tale of the 1930s economic depression. While late for the rent at the beginning neither Arturo or Camilla are ranked with the homeless who briefly appear in the movie. True Arturo is often skint, but he is saved from destitution by an unexpected cheque from his magazine publisher. At the very end of the film he is apparently wealthy and successful but that is an add-on which has little or nothing to do with the story.
The cinematography is superb and the low key jazzy guitar music on the background soundtrack is haunting and appropriate to the setting. If you don't believe me just Ask the Dust! Altogether a good, though not a great movie.
Description of Ask the Dust
Colin Farrell is Arturo Bandini, a young would-be writer who comes to Depression-era Los Angeles to make a name for himself. While there, he meets beautiful barmaid Camilla (Salma Hayek), a Mexican immigrant who hopes for a better life by marrying a wealthy American. Both are trying to escape the stigma of their ethnicity in blue-blood California. The passion that arises between them is palpable ? if they could only set aside their ambitions and submit to it. Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Towne (Chinatown) directs this outcasts? tale of desire in the desert, co-starring Donald Sutherland (Pride and Prejudice).Adapted from the acclaimed 1939 novel by John Fante, Ask the Dust represents a 30-year labor of love for Robert Towne, the Oscar®-winning screenwriter of Chinatown. It's easy to see why Towne was drawn to Fante's classic tale of ill-fated romance in Depression-era Los Angeles: It's a tenacious, hard-scrabble valentine to Towne's beloved city, to the lonely craft of writing, and to the elusive whims of love. Towne must have been inspired by the challenge of capturing the inner life and outer environs of Fante's literary hero, struggling writer Aturo Bandini (played by Colin Farrell), as he arrives in L.A. circa 1932, sells occasional stories to legendary American Mercury editor H.L. Mencken (heard only in voice-overs provided by film critic Richard Schickel), lives in the seedy Alta Loma hotel in the dusty neighborhood of Bunker Hill (where a fellow resident is played by Donald Sutherland), and falls into a stormy relationship with Camilla (Salma Hayek), a Mexican waitress who shares Bandini's immigrant dreams for a better life in sunny California. There are good times and bad in this passionately combative romance (and Hayek has never been more sensuously appealing onscreen), and Towne has done a perfect job of capturing an arid combination of hope, depression, and artistic ambition, working in fruitful collaboration with celebrated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Black Stallion) on meticulously authentic Depression-era sets built on location (of all places) in South Africa. Ask the Dust never fully succeeds as an emotionally involving drama (the lives of writers are notoriously difficult to translate to film), but there's something undeniably seductive about this curious and great-looking film... and we're not just talking about Farrell and Hayek cavorting naked in the ocean. Even that memorable scene is infused with the threat of broken dreams, as if Towne were reminding us (and himself) that nothing good comes without sacrifice.--Jeff Shannon