March 16, 2006

Ask the Dusk
Written and Directed by Robert Towne
Opens March 17

By LESTER GRAY
Arts Editor

Lovemaking in movies, grown stale with the hackneyed paths to coupling, poses a serious threat to both fictive romance and prurient interest. The passion attending these consummations most resemble those associated with a game of Trivial Pursuit — which by the way is more likely to result in a rematch. And the vicarious throngs, gobbling popcorn, might never have been the wiser, were it not for the chemistry of Colin Farrell and Selma Hayek.

Farrell plays Arturo Bandini, a fledgling Italian writer newly come to Depression-era Los Angeles. Alternately overconfident and insecure, flush and broke, he looks to cash in on the talent he often doubts and shed the “wop” image he suffered back east.

Hayek is Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress with a thick accent and dark skin who whimsies that changing her last name, through marriage, to something that sounds Anglo will free her from the racial bit that controls her. Her soon-to-be ex, the bartender where she works, is the seldom-portrayed-in-film, stereotypical white ne’er-do-well to whom a minority latches, the latter anticipating a social promotion.

Camilla and Arturo, both self-loathers, immediately recognizing each other for what they are, share an intimate and contemptuous familiarity, trading vicious barbs only a marginalized insider could appreciate. In this brutal and conflicted attraction a rare heat begins to rise.

Writer and director Robert Towne has been waiting almost three decades to do this film, an interpretation of a John Fante novel of the same title that he discovered while doing research for his Oscar-winning Chinatown script.

Ask the Dusk will not bring another Academy Award for Towne; its most exceptional merits are neither mainstream nor obvious. The film succeeds as a romantic tragedy, but it’s much more than that.

Towne gives us a rare statement, with nuance and metaphor, of the ineffable and ironic cruelty that complements the joy of assimilation in the American melting pot. One of the less subtle clues to this theme, which comes a bit late for Arturo and the audience, is when Camilla screams, “You’re too ashamed of being an Italian to marry a Mexican.”

She understands what he never will. It is Camilla, for whom even a Faustian exchange would have been a bargain, who arrives alone at a cruel lucidity. She is obliged, given Arturo’s naivety — a privilege he doesn’t even know he has — to indulge his romantic visions of liberation. He fails to realize that their getaway, literally at the very margins of the country, is a hideaway.

No, Mr. Towne, they do not give statues for the sublime, which your movie is, but rather the spectacular. You should nonetheless be proud. n