by MARK SLUTSKY

Roman Polanski’s Chinatown is doubtlessly one of the most thoughtful and penetrating cinematic treatments of the city of Los Angeles as it existed in the 1930s. So at first it seems to make a lot of sense that the film’s writer, the much-fêted (at least in the ’70s, when he was at his prime) Robert Towne, would be the one to adapt John Fanté’s novel Ask the Dust, also set in the L.A. of that period. But the guy’s recent track record is not so good—unless you were a big fan of The Firm, or of Love Affair, that 1994 remake of An Affair to Remember with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. As a director, he’s probably best remembered for Personal Best (although somebody somewhere must look back fondly on Tequila Sunrise).

Towne is both writer and director of Ask the Dust, and although the movie looks like it was made on a pretty economical budget (to put it nicely), he’s managed to round up some reasonable name actors, with Salma Hayek, Colin Farrell and Donald Sutherland starring. Farrell plays Arturo Bandini, an aspiring Italian-American novelist who’s recently moved to L.A. from the Midwest. Living in a boarding house in the city’s downtown Bunker Hill neighbourhood, he sits at his typewriter and waits for inspiration, occasionally receiving a cheque from H.L. Mencken, who’s published one of his stories in The American Mercury.

Down to his last nickel, Farrell gets a cup of coffee in a bar, where he meets waitress Camilla Lopez (Hayek), and immediately begins a semi-passionate, mutually abusive relationship with her. The two frolic nude in the ocean, yell at each other, don’t see each other for a while and end up hanging out in a house by the sea as Farrell works on his novel and the movie takes a ridiculously melodramatic turn that will not be revealed, only strongly hinted at, in this review.

Now, L.A. in this period is definitely a fascinating subject, and Towne fits in a lot of neat period details—this was a time when automobiles and airplanes still co-existed with horse-drawn carriages, spittoons and incurable tuberculosis. But while the movie, shot in Cape Town, South Africa, tries to pull you into its world, it’s got a low-budget, made-for-TV vibe that’s hard to shake—you can see it all too well showing up on CTV, nudity excised, at 2 a.m. on a Saturday. And the once-great Towne really has made a hash of the script—this is a movie where a character coughs two-thirds of the way through the movie to nakedly telegraph a tragic end, and this is also the kind of movie where at the end the protagonist writes a book about the amazing events we’ve just seen and that book is called… Ask the Dust. Boo! But the movie’s most marked failure is the lack of chemistry between the two leads, which is as much the fault of the writing and directing as anything else in this awkward adaptation.

Ask the Dust opens Friday, March 24

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