Going to Towne in 1930s L.A.

Ask the Dust

directed by Robert Towne

Would Robert Towne, writer of the classic Chinatown, have had the courage or smarts to address Hollywood (read: American) racism on his own? His adaptation of the John Fante novel Ask the Dust explores status quo prejudice more succinctly than most other movies would dare.

Towne casts Colin Farrell and Selma Hayek as ethnic wannabes: Farrell's an Italian-American writer and Hayek's a Mexican-American waitress, both toiling in Depression-era Los Angeles and hungering for the all-white ideal. Falling in love makes each pilgrim confront his/her own subconscious racism.

He casts Farrell and Hayek to represent ideals as well as authentic American types. This gorgeous duo suggests the Golden-Age images of Tyrone Power and Katy Jurado, a brown-eyed answer to the blue-eyed con-job of Towne's 1987 Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Kurt Russell vehicle Tequila Sunrise (which suggested a white supremacist trifle hidden within standard escapism).

But Ask the Dust presents an allegory that goes past Hollywood cliché. Set in the past, its '30s myth uncovers the root of racism's entrenchment in the Raymond Chandler-style Hollywood myths we take for granted. The film's fascination (which is great) can be measured by how un-noir it steadily becomes.

Surpassing even Barton Fink's nostalgic noir cynicism, Towne commits to the subject of two people struggling to overcome social restrictions they unconsciously believe. (Hayek blanches when she sees a movie in which Ruby Keeler boasts about being "free, white and 21.") If this was set in the present, the significance of Towne's endeavor would be unmistakable even to those who insist that movies only be escapist nonsense. (Though that might also risk the same ridicule that greeted James L.Brooks' overlooked superb serious-comedy Spanglish.)

If anything, Towne's politicized romance most resembles the spiritual and cultural clash of Jacques Demy's 1969 The Model Shop where a naive American boy has his assumptions-and his heart-challenged by an exotic woman. At its best, Ask the Dust reminds me of David Byrne's brave declaration "I am trying to overcome the racism that is instilled in me by society." Towne's self-critical love story subverts Hollywood's overloaded mythology about itself.