'Ask the Dust'

By Norman Wilner, Special to Zap2it.com, Zap2It.com | July 24, 2006

Salma Hayek and Colin Farrell in 'Ask the Dust'

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"Ask the Dust" gives writer-director Robert Towne the chance to rebuild the Los Angeles of the early 1930s -- the city of his dreams, apparently, as well as the setting of his greatest triumph, the screenplay for Roman Polanski's "Chinatown."

It's an incredibly convincing production, as though Towne has reconstituted the very atoms of the old city -- the quality of the light, the heaviness of the summer air, the textures of the thin sheets of typing paper on which the writer Arturo Bandini (Colin Farrell) struggles so desperately to reinvent himself, when he's not sneering at the smoldering Mexican bar waitress (Salma Hayek) with whom he's locked in an ongoing sadomasochistic dance.

"Ask the Dust" is Towne's adaptation of the novel by John Fante, whose 1930s tales of socially aware, self-loathing protagonists are said to have inspired the Beat writers who followed in the 1950s ... and like several other key works of misfit literature, it's a book that's ill-suited to the screen. Bandini's moping interior monologue grows quickly tedious, Hayek's character has a most predictable arc, and their scenes together smack more of awkwardness than intimacy. Dialogue and gestures that might have seemed elliptical and suggestive on the page just hang in the dead, dry air, and there's nothing Towne can do to give them life.

For a while, though, he does convince us that actors as contemporary as Farrell and Hayek are living in Fante's long-ago Los Angeles, where coffee costs a nickel, a Scotch highball is 45 cents, and milk is still delivered by the bottle at four in the morning. The texture of his film is exquisite. Shame about the story.

Paramount's DVD offers a gorgeous enhanced-widescreen presentation of the feature, a 14-minute making-of featurette that offers some intriguing glimpses of the re-created L.A. set sitting in the middle of the actual location in Cape Town, South Africa, and a thoughtful, impassioned audio commentary from Towne and his masterful director of photography, Caleb Deschanel. It's not much, but it's more interesting than the movie.

STUDIO: Paramount Home Entertainment
RELEASE DATE: July 25, 2006
RATING: R
PRICE: $29.99
TIME: 116 minutes
DVD EXTRAS: English subtitles; audio commentary; production featurette.
INTERNET SITE: www.askthedust-movie.com