Ask the Dust (**3/4)

Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek are well cast as wary lovers in writer-director Robert Towne’s artful adaptation of John Fante’s 1939 novel. Towne beautifully captures the feel of the time and place, a Los Angeles seething with multi-ethnic newcomers, but the couple’s interactions have a stiff, literary quality.

John Fante’s autobiographical 1939 novel was languishing in semi-obscurity when writer Robert Towne first thought of turning it into a movie. That was over 30 years ago, before Towne cemented his reputation with his script for the 1974 classic Chinatown. Meanwhile, the novel’s reputation grew, and Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek grew up and got cast when Towne finally secured financing. For Towne, it’s a return to an older Los Angeles, though the characters in Chinatown probably wouldn’t know the ones here. Newcomers like Farrell’s Arturo Bandini, a struggling, Italian American writer, or Hayek’s Camilla, a Mexico-born waitress, formed a diaspora in the desert that swelled the population by a million in just 20 years. The way Towne artfully conjures this long-gone L.A. (filming was in South Africa) is as much a reason to see the movie as anything else. Camilla is a step below Arturo on the racial hierarchy of the day, and this makes a difference. Nowadays, we see period dramas, like The Notebook, where the characters feel too modern. These don’t. They casually insult one another’s ethnicity; they rent by the week; they suffer from TB. This is what I liked about the movie, plus the actors. But there’s something too literary about the adaptation. The verbal battles between Arturo and Camilla struck me as stilted, even as I admired the snappy dialogue. And the sudden intrusion, and equally sudden departure, of a third (or fourth) character in the drama, seemed unnatural. The couple’s halting romance lurches to a resolution that’s heart-rending to the extent you’ve bought the characters. I was about half way there.

IMDb link

posted 9/9/13