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''You call me beautiful at home, then you are ashamed to be seen with me in public. You are ashamed of beauty you recognize that no one else does. You are ashamed to love me!''
In the 1930s, penniless Arturo Bandini (Farrell) lodges in LA and tries to become an author, worrying that he?s too inexperienced to have anything to write about. He has a complex relationship with Camilla (Hayek), a Mexican waitress, which eventually inspires him to finish a novel.
Colin Farrell: Arturo Bandini
Salma Hayek: Camilla
Mesmerizing narration, acting and story, Ask The Dust shows the desperation of the times.
Colin Farrel and Salma Hayek have some good chemistry and some good narration and voice-overs. You become attached to Colin's character as he progresses through the story.
The upshot is a careful, deliberately old-fashioned picture which has many admirable qualities. Filmed in South Africa, it creates a distinctive vision of 30s LA that doesn't overlap too much with Towne's Fante-influenced script for Chinatown. It fills a hillside hotel with deadbeats and eccentrics (including Donald Sutherland) and springs several surprising forces of nature, from unexpectedly heavy waves that turn a nude midnight swim into a near-death experience, to an earthquake that tears up a pavement.
There's a startling supporting turn from Idina Menzel as a character so unusual the film comes to life when she barges in and finds it hard to not leave an impression.
In contrast, Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek (who both look way too healthy and buff) play characters who are frustratingly charismatic. Their affair dawdles in squabbles for an hour, before finally coming into focus in intimate flourishing scenes.
Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel's shots are each a marvel of painterly cinema, just the right brownish, noir-ish lighting and shadows to create a marginal world of dream and destitution where only love could create wealth. And what a love. These two leads are to the camera born, their dark good looks making them as much brother and sister as reluctant lovers. Farrell speaks almost as if he is narrating, which he does as well, his intonations are weighty, uncharacteristic of the more flamboyant characters he is used to playing. Hayek has lusty dignity with a spicy stubbornness that makes you believe she is worthy of marrying this man and living happily ever after.
End result a curiously irresistible drama, despite several strong elements,the most notable being newcomer Idina Menzel.
9/10
