Ask the Dust

REVIEW
Along with Martin Scorcese, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, and Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Towne began his career as one of many Roger Corman-funded talents who would go on to rock the ’70s film industry. Towne’s most notable effort during the polyester decade was his screenplay for Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, one of the few films to successfully uphold the “neo-noir” genre. More often than not a director will try to recreate the seedy morality, fast-talking dames, and shadowy sets of classic noirs only to ruin it all by awkwardly drawing attention to the timeliness of the style. Ask the Dust commits a few of these errors, at times toeing the line between “bad” and “okay” as a melodramatic period piece starring, ahem, Colin Farrell. It has its moments, but another Chinatown, it is not.

Farrell plays Arturo Bandini, a disgruntled Italian American and aspiring writer who periodically receives monetary boosts and long-distance nods of approval from his hero, H.L. Mencken. While working on his novel, Bandini embarks on a bizarre and sadistic courtship with Camilla Lopez, played by the stunningly attractive (and sometimes naked) Salma Hayek, against the backdrop of Depression-era Los Angeles. There’s a running theme of uncomfortable race relations that never comes to fruition; Bandini’s foil is a bleached-blond bartender aptly named “Sam White.” Donald Sutherland chews the scenery in a charming way as Bandini’s gay lush housemate. And while Towne may still be best known as a phenomenal screenwriter, Ask the Dust is a film that would perhaps be better received if viewed without sound — not only to emphasize the gorgeous cinematography, but to also drown out Colin Farrell’s faltering American accent.