Salma Hayek Ask the Dust
Salma Hayek : Salma Hayek's Ask the Dust Movie
Who is
harder to portray in a movie than a writer? The standard portrait is
familiar: The shabby room, the typewriter, the bottle, the cigarettes,
the crazy neighbors, the nickel cup of coffee, the smoldering sexuality
of the woman who comes into his life. Robert Towne's "Ask the Dust" is
not the first film to evoke this vision of a writer's life, and not the
first to find that typing is not a cinematic activity. Just last week
"Winter Passing" starred Ed Harris in a version of the same kind of
character at the other end of his career.
Still, in its wider focus, "Ask the Dust" finds a kind of poetry,
because although we may not find it noble and romantic to sit alone in a
room, broke and hung over and dreaming of glory, a writer can, and must.
The film stars Colin Farrell as Arturo Bandini, who lives in a Los
Angeles rooming house during the Depression. He has sold one story to
the American Mercury, edited by H. L. Mencken, the god of American
letters, and now he tries to write more: "The greatest man in America --
do you want to let him down?"
Arturo has one nickel, with which he buys a cup of coffee in a diner
where Camilla (Salma Hayek) is the waitress. Something happens between
them, but it is expressed curiously. One day she gives him a free beer,
which he pours into a spittoon. She takes the magazine with his story,
tears it up, and throws it into the same spittoon. Why this hostility,
which is meant to mask lust but seems gratuitous?
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The answer may be in the
source of the material. Ask the Dust is a novel by John Fante, a writer
of the generation just before Charles Bukowski, who saw to it that the
book was reissued by his publisher, the Black Sparrow Press. It shares
Bukowski's view of women who are attracted to a courtship consisting
largely of hostility. In "Ask the Dust," there is the additional element
of racism; Camilla is wounded, as she should be, by prejudice against
Mexicans in the city, and Bandini is uneasy about his Italian heritage.
When they go to the movies together, Anglos pointedly move away from
them, but the movie evokes racism without really engaging it, and the
crucial scenes in their romance take place in a cottage on a deserted
Laguna Beach, where they create a world of their own. There is also the
mysterious Jewish woman Vera (Idina Menzel), who comes into his life,
makes a sudden and deep impression, reveals to him her scarred body, and
then departs from the plot in a particularly Los Angeles sort of way.
What the movie is about, above all, is the bittersweet solitude of the
would-be great writer. Whether Arturo will become the next Hemingway (or
Fante, or Bukowski) is uncertain, but Farrell shows him as a young man
capable of playing the role should he win it. He could also possibly
live a long and happy life with Camilla, but stories like this exist in
the short run, and are about problems, not solutions.
I did not feel a strong chemistry between Farrell and Hayek, but I have
started to write the word "chemistry" with growing doubts. What is it,
anyway? William Hurt and Kathleen Turner had it in "Body Heat," and
Nicolas Cage and Cher in "Moonstruck," but "Ask the Dust" does not
provide a setting for great dramatic towering lust and love: It is about
poverty, fatigue, lives that are young but already old in
discouragement. Perhaps what we are meant to feel between Arturo and
Camilla is not chemistry but geometry: They could fit well together, and
provide each other's missing angles.
I enjoyed and admired the
film without being grabbed or shaken by it. Where can such a story lead?
I have been lucky enough to know a great writer in his shabby apartment,
with his typewriter, his bottle and his cigarettes, and I know he had a
famous romance, and that later he hated the woman, and having achieved
all possible success was perhaps not as happy as when it was still
before him.
What immediately impressed me about "Ask the Dust" was its evocation of
time and place. The cinematographer Caleb Deschanel creates
Depression-era Los Angeles with the same love the 2005 "King Kong"
lavished on New York at the same period, and although one is a smaller
film about a writer and the other is an epic about an ape, the
cityscapes are so evocative they take on a character of their own. In
the case of "King Kong," much of the city was special effects; in "Ask
the Dust" there are some effects but Deschanel in large part is working
with reality.
Towne filmed on location in Cape Town, a city I lived in for a year, and
I agree with him that it can double for prewar Los Angeles. Just keep
Table Mountain out of the shot, and you have storefront cafes, rooming
houses built on hillsides with the front door on the top floor, palm
trees, and a feeling in some neighborhoods of strangers who don't know
what brought them together or why they wait. Such a person is Hellfrick
(Donald Sutherland), Arturo's wise, weary neighbor, who shuffles onstage
to provide the ghost of Arturo's possible future.
"Ask the Dust" requires an audience with a special love for film noir,
with a feeling for the loneliness and misery of the writer, and with an
understanding that any woman he meets will be beautiful. Such stories
are never about understanding landladies. I am not sure the film
achieves great things, but it achieves its smaller things perfectly.
( Article Written by Rogert Ebert )