Movie Review: Robert Towne's Ask the Dust - Laughing at Your Own Funeral - Page 2

Camilla doesn't have Arturo's mean streak, but in some ways she's even more hesitant about him than he is about her. She'd like to sleep with him but is also holding out for an opportunity to make a better life. To her, the chief opportunity appears to be marriage to a blond American-American named Sammy White (Justin Kirk), although he occasionally hits her and has TB besides. When Camilla realizes she's in love with Arturo, she doesn't tell him as much but asks if he'd ever consider changing his name — she wouldn't want to raise her kids with the last name Bandini. (She has fancifully registered her car under the name "Camilla Lombard.") Arturo points out that he hasn't proposed.

It takes Arturo and Camilla three-quarters of the picture to get together because they're so bristly they can barely see each other without fighting. The text cues us that their problems arise from the difficulties of "ethnicity" in the pre-assimilation era, but the wonderful thing about the picture is that Towne plays the tension between them for comedy rather than pathos. The script makes ethnic prejudice in Southern California palpable (e.g., in Newport Beach, Arturo and Camilla sit down to watch the 1934 movie Dames — in which Ruby Keeler announces her independence with the old catchphrase, "I'm free, white, and 21" — and an Anglo girl moves away from Camilla) but it stops short of turning the lovers into victims. (The treatment of the immigrant subject, with its turbid mix of idealism and resentment, is reminiscent of some of Paul Muni's "accent" melodramas, Bordertown [1935] and Black Fury [1935], though it's much less heavy-handed.)

Arturo and Camilla have more stature than, say, Julianne Moore and Dennis Haysbert in Far From Heaven (2002) precisely because we see that they're primarily victims of their own reactiveness. Fante and Towne give them enough existence to make mistakes, and so we can identify with them without sinking into self-pity. Because they're trapped in their emotions, Arturo and Camilla can't see that they're romantic-comic sparring partners: every insult and outrage, every missed opportunity, binds them more tightly. (Arturo can't keep the ardor out of his voice when he's belittling Camilla for wearing huaraches.) Farrell and Hayek both get the joke, and understand that it can't be played too openly for laughs. Arturo and Camilla have to want to be in a grand romance that they helplessly shut themselves out of. The poor fools eye each other with tormented longing while from the outside they appear as married as they could get without a license or ceremony.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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