PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 3/14/06)

Ask the Dust, Robert Towne's adaptation of the semi-classic John Fante novel, is being released just as Crash's Oscar victory has focused attention on the tense denizens of Los Angeles. The mere idea of a new movie set in these environs written and directed by the man who penned Chinatown and Shampoo is cause to hope for something special. But much of Ask The Dust is unfocused, and tepid where it wants to be passionate.

Set in the thirties, Ask the Dustis the story of Arturo Bandini (Colin Farrell), a broke 20-year-old author who arrives in L.A. determined to write the elusive Great American Novel. As his career progresses in fits and starts, he enters into a tempestuous relationship with a Mexican waitress (Salma Hayek), as well as a briefer excursion into the orbit of a troubled Jewish woman burdened by a dark secret. These liaisons, of course, end tragically, with the callow young writer much sadder but inevitably wiser.

A longtime pet project of Towne's, this material seems to have been fussed over until all the life was taken from it. But if Ask the Dust falls short, it's not for lack of effort on Farrell's part. He works so hard here that watching him eventually becomes exhausting, but at least it lends the occasional spark to the proceedings. Hayek, on the other hand, appears to have been left largely to her own devices; she turns to surliness or pouting as a default mode for the complex emotions her character is supposedly feeling. And considering how central to the film's themes and ideas their relationship is, Farrell and Hayek are two beautiful people with absolutely no chemistry. Even when they're lying in bed together, they're so far apart that they might as well be in different movies.

Still, Ask the Dust is not without its charms. There are wonderful supporting turns, particularly by Eileen Atkins, as a sour, casually racist landlady, and by Justin Kirk, who's memorable as a possible rival for Hayek's affections. Caleb Deschanel's luminous cinematography imbues everything with a sense of barely concealed rot, from a plate of orange peels to the frantic hubbub of the Long Beach boardwalk—fitting for a Robert Towne film about the vanished world of '30s L.A. Given the film's setting and some sequences that seem to be deliberately trading on our memories of Chinatown, comparisons become impossible to avoid. It's the ghost haunting the corners of the frame.—John Migliore