Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust

Who is harder to depict accurately in a movie than a writer? The common image is all-too-familiar: The dingy room, the typewriter, the empty bottle, the cigarettes, the crazy neighbors, the nickel cup of coffee, the smoldering sexuality of the woman who walks into his life. Typing is not cinematic. This truth was just reaffirmed by “Winter Passing,” in which Ed Harris played a version of this character at another end of his career last week.

But in its larger focus “Ask the Dust” does find a kind of poetry because even if we may not find it noble or romantic to sit alone in a room and be broke and hung over and dream of glory well, we can’t do it. But maybe that’s what writers are for. Arturo Bandini (Colin Farrell) lives during the Depression in a Los Angeles rooming house inhabited largely by Mexicans. He has sold one story to H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury and now tries to write others: “The greatest man in America do you want to let him down?”

Arturo has one nickel with which he buys a cup of coffee from Camilla (Salma Hayek), who waits tables in a diner across Broadway from Bunker Hill. Something happens between them, but it is expressed oddly; one day she gives him a free beer, which he pours into her spittoon; she takes his magazine with his story, tears it up and throws it into her spittoon: Why this hostility that is meant to mask lust but seems gratuitous?

It may be that Ask the Dust is being filmed for reasons of source material rather than content; it’s by John Fante (1909-1983), an L.A.-born novelist who was writing before Charles Bukowski came along. Bukowski saw to it that Fante came back into print through Black Sparrow Press (which also published Bukowski). The movie shares Bukowski’s view of women attracted to a courtship consisting largely of hostility.

In Ask the Dust, there is an additional element of racism Camilla is wounded as she should be by prejudice against Mexicans in the city; Bandini is uneasy about his Italian heritage, and 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 Vera (Idina Menzel), who comes into his life, makes a sudden and deep impression, reveals her scarred body to him and then departs from the plot in a particularly L.A. kind of way.

But what do I care about that? What I’m left with isn’t Ask the Dust’s narrative or even its characters so much as its bittersweet sense of what it means to want to be a great writer. We’re not sure whether Arturo will become the next Hemingway (or Fante or Bukowski) but he could play him now if he had to. He could also still have a very long and happy life with Camilla, but stories like this exist only in the short run, and are about problems, not solutions.

I did not detect much chemistry between Farrell and Hayek, but I have been hesitating over the word “chemistry”. What is it? Hurt and Turner had it in “Body Heat,” and Cage and Cher in “Moonstruck,” but “Ask the Dust” sets no stage for monumental dramatic lust and love; it is about tiredness, poverty, lives that are young and already middle aged with discouragement. Maybe what we’re supposed to feel between Arturo and Camilla isn’t chemistry at all, but geometry: They could fit together well, and give each other missing angles.

I liked the movie very much without being grabbed by it or shaken up. Where can a story like this go? I have known a great writer living in his shabby apartment where he has his bottle and typewriter, his cigarettes; I know he had a famous romance, and later came to hate the woman; I know that when all success was achieved happiness wasn’t as close as it had been then when it still lay ahead.

What struck me first about “Ask the Dust” was how powerfully it summoned time and place. The cinematographer Caleb Deschanel creates a Depression-era Los Angeles with the same love that 2005’s “King Kong” showed for New York in the same period; though one is a small film about a writer and the other an epic about an ape, these cityscapes have such character they almost become characters themselves. In truth K.K.’s city was largely special effects; there are some here too, yet Deschanel works mostly with reality.

Towne filmed in Cape Town, where I lived for a year, which can double for prewar L.A., as he says. Leave Table Mountain out of sight behind buildings like this one pictured above storefront cafes opening onto sidewalks that rise to rooming houses’ front doors on their top floors; palm trees bending over you as you walk between buildings; strangers who don’t know why they wait in neighborhoods like this. Hellfrick (Donald Sutherland) is such a man, Arturo’s wise, weary neighbor, shuffling onstage to provide the ghost of his possible future.

“Ask the Dust” asks an audience that loves film noir, bleak writer’s stories and beautiful women never understanding landladies. I’m not sure it achieves great things but it achieves its lesser effects perfectly.

Watch Ask the Dust For Free On Gomovies.