Love, Death and L.A.

By RICHARD CORLISS

In his 1939 novel Ask The Dust, John Fante looked at the folks around him in Los Angeles and saw "faces with the blood drained away, tight faces, worried, lost. Faces like flowers torn from their roots and stuffed into a pretty vase, the colors draining fast."

Fante's novel was a dirge-hymn to L.A. at the time when the first wave of immigrants, teeming west from the plains and north from Mexico, collided in a movie dream gone sour. Published to little note, it slowly found important devotees. Charles Bukowski, L.A.'s signature outlaw author, used to channel the book's hero, shouting "I am Bandini, Arturo Bandini!" Screenwriter Robert Towne fell in love with the book when researching his script for Chinatown, also set in the '30s. Now, a generation later, he has made an elegiac movie of Ask the Dust.

Bandini (Colin Farrell) is a writer who knows his subject--L.A.--but needs characters to animate it. That doesn't take long: strong-willed women keep showing up unbidden in his room, removing their clothes, tangling him in their sad fates. Vera (Idina Menzel), who loves Bandini's writing, needs someone to tend her wounds. Camilla (Salma Hayek), a Chicano waitress who can't read his words but has great body English, starts to lure Bandini away from his obsession with those beautiful golden-haired California girls.

Fante has a kindred spirit in Towne, whose scripts for Shampoo, The Two Jakes, Tequila Sunrise and other films create nearly as dense an overview of Southern California as August Wilson did of Pittsburgh, Pa. And Towne was lucky in his casting of Hayek, who always smolders intelligently, and Farrell. The actor can be roguish, annoying, sexy, loving and lost--Bandini to a T. Towne is more trusting of them than he is of the book's plot; toward the end he seems to mistake Fante's Camilla for Garbo's Camille. But the moments the olive-skinned lovers spend together give the movie its hints of soul.

The rest is a fairly stately, sometimes stilted evocation of antique attitudes and older, better movies. The torpid pace and expertly muted cinematography (by Caleb Deschanel) inevitably suggest the fading fragrance of those flowers Fante described. Ask the Dust is the ghost of a cult novel; it can't bring itself to life.