Love story

Noel Vera

John Fante was a relatively unsung poet of '30s Los Angeles, his
novel "Ask the Dust"--featuring Fante's alter-ego, the ambitious and
insufferable Arturo Bandini--a relatively unknown but intense
autobiographical rant against the City of Angel's racism and
implacability, and his own self-loathing self. The book possibly
influenced J.D. Salinger--his Holden Caulfield sounds like a
younger, better-fed version of Bandini. Charles Bukowski--who calls
Fante his "God"--describes his discovery of Fante thusly: "one day I
pulled a book down and opened it, and there it was…like a man who
had found gold in the city dump, I carried the book to a table."
Michael Tolkin (who wrote "The Player") is an admirer; and writer-
director Robert Towne nursed a longtime dream of adapting the book
to film.

It wasn't easy. Towne had discovered Fante's work back in the
early '70s, when he was researching his script for "Chinatown;" at
one point, just after the first two "Godfather" films became a huge
hit, Francis Ford Coppola had planned to do Fante's "Brotherhood of
the Grape" using a script by Towne. Johnny Depp waited a year for
Towne to get the financing together; Towne never did. Even Leonardo
DiCaprio was at one point attached to the project.

Now, some thirty years since he read the book, Towne has finally
managed to make his film, with Colin Farrell as Bandini and Salma
Hayek as Bandini's inamorata, Camilla. This Bandini isn't exactly
Fante's--the self-loathing is largely absent, and much of the racist
invectives Bandini and Camilla hurl at each other have been toned
down. But Towne's recreation of the time and place is
preternaturally uncanny--not just the sunlight and heat haze (the
film was shot in South Africa, which does a superb job of evoking
the relatively unpolluted desert air of '30s Los Angeles), but the
look of an Angeleno street in the midday sun (the pedestrians still
outnumbering motor vehicles), and the genteel way a white woman
stands up to move away from Camilla (politely ignoring her glare)
inside a movie theater.

Fante's novel is also full of Bandini's fantasies, rants, personal
thoughts--difficult stuff to film (unless I suppose you ask Michel
Gondry to turn it into an "it's all in his head" picture [come to
think of it, Gondry might have been a good--or at least interesting--
choice to adopt Macolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano" one more time,
maybe do a remake of Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's
Nest"]). Towne goes the old-fashioned (John Huston?) route, and
focuses on the affair between Bandini and Camilla. He's a so-so
filmmaker (skilled, not riveting) and a superb director of actors;
he manages to make Farrell convincingly Italian (Towne in an
interview notes that Farrell is a Black Irish--an ethnicity that
shares with the Italian Americans a put-upon lower-class Catholicism
Farrell is able to channel), and he gives Hayek what I would
consider her most fully realized role as a beautiful woman (which
she is; something you don't quite realize in "Frida," what with that
distracting prosthetic brow). This may be at variance with what
Fante originally wrote, but it's also the frankest, bleakest, most
unsentimental portrait of lovers I can remember in recent films. The
eroticism is direct, if muted, as in the scene where Hayek lies on
Farrell's bed and admits she's not wearing underwear--better than
actual nudity is the sexual electricity between Farrell and Hayek,
an electricity all the more intense because it crackles in the midst
of the stormy, multifaceted antagonism roiling between them (you
can't believe on how many grounds the two battle each other: Italian
versus Mexican, citizen versus immigrant, literate versus
illiterate, man versus woman). The two in their struggles are like a
microcosm of Los Angeles' marginalized classes, one ethnic group
struggling to gain dominance over the other. The tragedy is that
the two share more things in common than they do things different
(their dark skin, their impoverished lifestyle, the way they stand
outside white, middle -society), which ideally should draw them
together; instead, Bandini as often as not uses that common
experience to read Camilla's vulnerabilities better, tear into her
more effectively--Camilla as often as not responding in kind.

And because they are so alive as characters we buy the relatively
romanticized ending--or at least the ending here seems more
palatable than when something similar is presented in other romantic
movies (we believe in their romance because we believe in them as
people, we believe in them because we see that they can be as flawed
and hateful to each other as anyone we know--as we ourselves
sometimes are).

There's a subtext to all this that helps explain, and ultimately,
forgive Towne his less-than-faithful version of Fante's masterpiece:
that this is a seventy-year-old veteran filming the work of a thirty-
year-old angry young man. If Towne had managed to make the film as
he intended, twenty years ago, maybe the results would have been
closer to what Fante wrote; as is, there's something fascinating
about the way Towne softens Fante's hard edges. It's as if he had
lived with (come to know, learned to love) the characters for too
long not to be more forgiving of their foibles, suffered too much of
the same things they suffered not to accord them some measure of
compassion, even solace--a time they can spend with each other, for
example (the trip to the beach was much sketchier in the original,
and Camilla's illiteracy is a Towne invention). It's as if this
older man has taken the unforgiving vision of the younger, angrier
man, shaken his head fondly, and--well, rearranged the picture a
little, to better suit the view from where he's sitting. The result
isn't great art, but it's interesting, even moving, art--you can't
help but feel that while this may not be the apex of Towne's career,
it is some kind of valedictory statement, a summing up of his view
of the world.

(First published in Businessworld, 2/16/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)