The pre-action viewing of the collection attracted some 35,000 visitors including many French art collectors and a New York-based art dealer named Franck Giraud. The particular buyers for many of the highly-prized works were not disclosed. But it looks like the Daily Transom was correct in predicting that major Russian art collectors would have something to do with bringing back hope to the flailing art market when the time came.

According to the Bloomberg article, "Among the last-minute VIP visitors to the exhibition hall, just four hours before the sale, was Russian billionaire art collector Roman Abramovich, accompanied by dealer Larry Gagosian. Christie’s owner, French billionaire Francois Pinault, was present at the sale."

Last year, Mr. Abramovich made headlines by purchasing a Degas for $26.5 million, a Francis Bacon triptych for $86.3 million, and a painting by Lucian Freud for $33.6 million. And his girlfriend Dasha Zhukova opened an art gallery in Moscow called The Garage not too long ago. Incidentally, Mr. Gagosian was a guest at the gallery's soft opening.

"I can now phone up my clients and say there is nothing wrong with the market," Paolo Vedovi, director of Brussels-based Galerie Vedovi, told Bloomberg after the auction was finished.

White House social secretary Desiree Rogers attended Carolina Herrera's show this morning, and also plans to stop by Donna Karan and Thakoon. [WWD] 

Kanye West is acting like a diva at fashion week, refusing to speak to people and hiding behind his entourage. (He tried to give us the slip at the Band of Outsiders show on Sunday.) [NY Daily News]  

Model Coca Rocha is interviewing celebrities at the shows this week for E! News. [WWD] 

Giorgio Armani is guest-blogging for NYTimes.com blog The Moment about his trip from Milan, over-cooked American pasta at Scarpetta and clubbing till 2 a.m. at Cielo. [The Moment] 

Meanwhile, in other Tina Fey news... Our crush will reportedly be appearing on tomorrow's Saturday Night Live winking and golly-gee'ing her way through playing Sarah Palin in a skit about the Vice Presidential debate. No word yet on who will play Senator Joe Biden (might we suggest Jason Sudekis, with his clenched jaw demeanor), but supposedly actress Queen Latifah will be taking on the role of debate moderator Gwen Ifill. And if that's still not enough to get you to DVR SNL, maybe host Anne Hathaway and musical guest The Killers will do the trick.

Valentino's designer, Alessandra Facchinetti, might depart from the fashion house only a year after taking it over from the retired designer, and Giambattista Valli is rumored to be next in line. [FWD]

The Hills star Whitney Port's new clothing line is available on Kitson's Web site. [The Cut]

Salma Hayek experienced culture shock when she arrived at the Balenciaga show in Paris on Tuesday; the actress was coming from Sierra Leone, where she was distributing vaccines. [WWD]

In the tradition of sample sales, many high-end Web sites are now featuring invitation-only designer sales. [NY Sun]

"We are sad to announce the engagement of Salma Hayek and Francois-Henri Pinault has been canceled. There will be no further comment," her publicist said in a statement.

Mr. Pinault is the CEO of PPR, a luxury brand company that owns Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga and Puma.

So what happened? Despite fine performances and occasional moments of fascinating visual beauty, Ask the Dust is long, lazy, plotless, formless, overwrought, hysterical, unconvincing and very, very boring.

I guess I expect too much from the man who won an Oscar for writing Chinatown, overlooking the fact that he also wrote two Mission Impossibles that were as incomprehensible as they were lousy. I expect nothing from the Paula Wagner–Tom Cruise team—or anyone, for that matter, responsible for such pretentious bilge as Vanilla Sky. But joining forces on a long-term dream of Mr. Towne’s that he’s been trying to make for 30 years should really add up to more than this hollow disappointment.

Obsessed with John Fante’s unfilmable cult novel, Mr. Towne’s adaptation recreates with affection and a keen eye for detail a story about fringe loonies in the immoral, no-hope Hollywood of 1933 with a plot no bigger than a ginger snap. A miscast Colin Farrell sheds his Irish accent and his clothes, finally delivering that nude scene scissored from A Home at the End of the World, as a tortured Italian writer named Arturo Bandini who lives in a dingy flophouse in downtown L.A. with a window offering a panoramic view of the city (though the movie was filmed in South Africa!). The prejudiced, pinch-faced landlady (the great Eileen Atkins, wasted beyond forgiveness) doesn’t allow Jews or Mexicans on the premises. Bandini, who lives on oranges and cigarettes, with a picture of his idol H.L. Mencken staring from the wall above his Smith Corona, is flat broke and so down on his luck that when he spends his last nickel on a cup of coffee, the cream is sour.

Lacking inspiration, he epitomizes the blocked writer searching for material, failing to realize that it’s all around him in the wounded and desperate souls he meets: the drunk down the hall (Donald Sutherland), the bartender with tuberculosis who wants to write westerns (Justin Kirk), the once-respectable woman covered with burns who works as a housekeeper for a Jewish family in Long Beach (Idina Menzel).

Instead, he is drawn to a Mexican waitress in the bar down the street named Camilla (Salma Hayek), who teases, insults and tries to seduce him, even though he rejects her in scene after scene, including a nude moonlight swim in the ocean. For inexplicable reasons that soon grow annoying and eventually decimate the viewer’s patience, Bandini can’t make love to a woman unless she’s terminally ill, disfigured or crazy. After the woman covered with scars finally beds him, she’s killed in a 6.4-magnitude earthquake in Long Beach, driving him deeper into his repressed shell of sexual fear, paranoia and repression.

By the time the Mexican waitress teaches him the meaning of passion and he gets around to thinking about marriage, she comes down with a big, noisy case of some mysterious Greta Garbo coughing disease. But at least he finishes his novel and walks away looking as dazzling as the Great Gatsby. What starts out with the cruel, mesmerizing Depression ambience of The Day of the Locust and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? winds up on a flat note, in the yellowed archives of columns by sob sister Louella O. Parsons.

Doggedly dedicated to getting the look and feel of the period right, Mr. Towne stretches a transparently thin plot to excessive length, emphasizing images with no sense of context and including everything but old Oxydol boxes: voiceover narration by the writer, opening credits stamped on the turning pages of his finished novel, an amusement park in a quake replete with a wooden roller coaster reduced to Tinkertoys. The film is deliciously retro, but so giddy with alliteration and souped-up dialogue (“When I called you a spick, it was not my heart that spoke, but the quivering of an old wound”) that it seems stoned on opium smoke. Ask the Dust never comes down to earth with any realism.

Playing sensitive, shy, arrogant, clean-shaven, decadent, naïve and impotent—all at the same time—is more than Colin Farrell can accomplish with any degree of conviction. He’s a far cry from what you might call a movie hero, even a marginal one. His emotional sexual paralysis makes him a bit of a pain in the ass. Sexy, salty and sensual, Salma Hayek is more emotionally direct, so she has no trouble stealing the movie. Both stars are pretty to look at, camera-ready and photographed like icons, but as characters who take two hours to bond, they are so vexing that the audience never really establishes a rapport with them as anything other than eight-by-10 glossies. The movie is so cynical it fails to sustain emotional impact.

I admire Robert Towne’s ambition and determination to bring to the screen a project he considers worthy and high-minded, regardless of the obstacles of box-office risks. Compared to most of the hacks who call themselves directors today, he is an accomplished visionary—but even as he recreates some of his same visions from Chinatown, his narrative technique for Ask the Dust is gimmicky, obvious, uncommercial and a real ordeal.

Remember Me?

Unknown White Male is a harrowing documentary that is every big-city cave dweller’s nightmare. Sometime during the summer of 2003, a young man named Doug Bruce boarded the New York subway system and disappeared. In what is technically called a “fugue state,” he woke up in Coney Island at 7 a.m. with amnesia—dazed, confused and near-catatonic, wearing flip-flops, shorts and a backpack containing keys, painkillers, a map of New York and the phone number of someone who didn’t know who he was when he called. The police were summoned and an ambulance took him to the blood-stained emergency room of a Coney Island hospital. The nurses wrote “unknown white male” on his chart. Test results showed no drugs, alcohol, traumas, brain tumors or neurological damage.

With no clinical evidence, he was transferred to the psychiatric ward. In the terrifying hours that followed, Doug Bruce ceased to exist. He’s been trying to put 35 lost years of his life back together ever since. This movie tells what happened and shows how an “unknown white male” survives in a city that cares more about pigeons than people.

A person in a “fugue state” can function for days or even weeks without knowing where they are, where they’ve just been or what they’ve just seen. (Same thing happens to me every time I leave a Lars von Trier movie.) Of course, there’s no footage of any of this retrograde action. It’s all related through Doug Bruce’s foggy narrative and the camera of his director friend, Rupert Murray—lots of shots of clocks, nurses in uniforms, hospital corridors. But the woman who answered her phone and didn’t know him put in a call to her daughter, who phoned the hospital, recognized the voice, identified Doug as a former stockbroker turned photographer and rescued him.

From here, the work began, like rehab for an amputee learning how to walk again. Doug had to start over, find out how much money he had in his bank account, familiarize himself with an apartment he didn’t recognize, adjust to old friends and lovers he no longer knew. Endocrinologists, neurologists and psychiatrists all have different opinions, and no two amnesia victims are the same, so despite the talking heads dispensing clinical information, you don’t go away from Unknown White Male understanding amnesia. You do see Doug re-meeting his family, absorbing their impressions, revisiting a storeroom in Paris where he boxed some of his memorabilia, tasting food, walking in the ocean like a toddler at the beach for the first time, learning to live again. The best thing about his ordeal is the way it renewed his interest in life, allowing him to experience originality through fresh eyes, without clichés: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, fireworks, snow, the taste of strawberries.

The film investigates who Doug Bruce was, is and will be. Numerous friends who have now become strangers try in vain to reconstruct his past and analyze their new relationships with him, but their home movies seem vague and inconsequential. Dislocated from the sum total of his life, you have to ask: Is he a new person now, or is he the same person altered by circumstances? Frankly, I personally think it would be a blast to reboot, like a computer, and start all over. But in Unknown White Male, nothing definitive ever really emerges. It’s a sad story without emotional impact, a fascinating subject treated in a mundane manner. In a sense, Doug Bruce is still an unknown white male. The impression is that the mystery of what happened to him is more interesting than the man it happened to.

Limited Range

Samantha Sidley, 20, is the winner of the Algonquin’s first annual Young Artist Competition. The prize: a two-week engagement at the Oak Room. Cute as a button and half the size, she’s a song stylist worth watching. Appearing with her through March 11 are three of her fellow students at the Berklee College of Music in Boston: Yoko Komori, a delicate Japanese pianist wearing one of Julie Wilson’s gardenias in her hair; Blake Marquez, a lanky collegiate-looking bass player; and Aaron Weinstein, a kid who looks 14 years old, writes arrangements and plays a violin so small you’d have to call it a fiddle.

Exploring a variety of moods and tempos, Ms. Sidley bends notes and breaks down the lyric lines on “Georgia on My Mind” like a seasoned jazz pro and fearlessly tackles numbers made famous by everyone from Tommy Dorsey to Patsy Cline. Playing to a tough crowd of New York critics, maybe it was an understandable case of nerves, but she wasn’t in total control of Duke Ellington’s “Just Squeeze Me,” and she swallowed a few too many notes in keys that were pitched too low for her range. She doesn’t have a big instrument, which is refreshing in today’s rodeo of screamers. But with a fragile voice, you need to work even harder on articulation. She has the ideas, taste and musical savvy to bring it off, and time is definitely on her side. She calls this gig “All My Tomorrows,” based on an evergreen by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen that used to be a staple of the late, great Sylvia Syms. Her weaknesses are obvious, but her tomorrows seem as bright as her debut outing. This is a girl who is going places.

Frida herself was a piece of work who managed to cram several lifetimes into her 47 years. Already crippled by polio as a child, she survived a near-

fatal trolley accident at 18 which crushed her pelvis and spine, fractured her leg in 11 different places, and left her in a steel corset and permanent agony. (She required more than 30 operations and the eventual amputation of her right leg.) Her two stormy marriages to legendary Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, a fat womanizer who was "the best of friends and the worst of husbands," her passionate devotion to the Communist Party, her many tempestuous love affairs with men and women (including Leon Trotsky and an illustrious singer who resembles Josephine Baker), her miscarriages and addictions and suspected suicide-it's all here, chronicled in facts, writings from her diaries, and the more than 200 autobiographical paintings she left behind (repainted from the originals in bold, quirky colors) as illustrations of her torrid life. Ms. Taymor and the real Frida are both nobly served by the feisty, luminous Salma Hayek, who spent six years raising the money for this project and serving as co-producer. Canadian theater director Robert Lepage, who is currently staging a play in London on Kahlo's life, described her as "a big, vulgar woman with missing teeth who smoked and drank, had affairs … and gobbled up life." Ms. Hayek is beautiful, flower-like and 5-foot-2, but as she moves with grace and passion through every contrasting emotional chapter in Frida's unconventional life, she gives a rangy, haunting performance that transforms her into a full-fledged star destined to be remembered in this year's Oscar nominations.

Belying its $12 million budget, the film is a lush, sensuous triumph with wonderful music, sumptuous cinematography that matches Ms. Hayek's beauty, and a striking use of puppets, computer animation and collages that come to life, in locations ranging from the colonial city of Puebla and the Aztec ruins of Teotihuacan to La Casa Azul, Frida's famous villa in Coyoacán, named for its azure blue walls. The film begins and ends in that house, with the stench of gangrene already upon her as her first exhibition is being planned in Mexico City. Forbidden by her doctor to leave her bed, Frida is carried through the streets by mariachis in the same four-poster bed where she taught herself to paint lying in a horizontal position. In flashbacks, we see her as a spunky teen, dressing like a boy to scandalize her parents; the horrific accident that left her crippled for years; and the bizarre relationship with Diego that began as fellow comrades fighting capitalism and led to an eternal love affair that brought her more torture than joy. Diego is played by Alfred Molina as a mad, excessive and violent hedonist with lusty appetites for food, fiestas and fornication. (On the morning after their wedding, Frida awoke to find Rivera's ex-wife cooking his favorite mole sauce in her kitchen. The woman stayed for years!) By all accounts, Frida was a better painter, but in the early stages of their life together, she sublimated her own talent to be his muse and inspiration and play a supplemental role in his career. The jazzy centerpiece of the film is Diego's invasion of New York-a swinging collage of dancing Stork Club matchbooks, big-band music, movie clips, Art Deco diners and a fantasy sequence in which Frida imagines Diego in the arms of King Kong, hanging from the Empire State Building. When Nelson Rockefeller commissions him to paint the murals at Rockefeller Center, then destroys them with a wrecking ball after Diego refuses to remove Lenin from the exhibit, the painter rants at the corruption of capitalism while Frida seduces the capitalists' wives. Back in Mexico, where Diego transfers his sexual favors to her sister, Frida offers political asylum to the exiled Trotsky (an unrecognizable Geoffrey Rush), revives his dead dreams and ideals by taking him as a lover, then goes to prison as a murder suspect when he is assassinated. Through it all, her experiences and feelings are reflected in the canvases which have now made her the darling of radical chic in the international art world. Felled by bronchitis, liver disease, alcoholism, drugs and depression, Frida ends the film as she did her life, carried through the streets of Mexico City to her career exhibition full of morphine and tequila. She died in 1954, at 47, leaving behind a controversial legacy. What a character, what a life, what a movie.

Understandably, the team of Taymor and Hayek called on some influential friends to enrich the ambiance. Without exception, the impressive cast is full of vitality and charisma. Roger Rees is superb as her German-Jewish father. Lovely Mia Maestro is Cristina Kahlo, the beloved sister who alienated Frida's affections by sleeping with Diego herself. Ashley Judd is the alluring feminist photographer Tina Modotti, who dances a flamboyant lesbian tango with Frida in a hot scene destined to generate more than a few fireworks. Antonio Banderas is the gun-wielding fellow artist and revolutionary, David Siqueiros. And Ms. Hayek's real-life boyfriend Edward Norton, who wrote part of the screenplay without credit, is a convincingly two-faced, buttoned-down Nelson Rockefeller.

Ms. Taymor manages to piece together the salient facts of a life charged by sex, politics and art with coherence and a strong allegiance to narrative, but at the same time she rubs the material with a brilliant patina of her own. Straightforward biography is superimposed with visuals, as the paintings of Kahlo and her husband Diego appear and dissolve. Kahlo devoted herself to the Buddhist theory that pain can produce beauty ("I took my tears and turned them into paintings," she declared in her diaries), and Ms. Taymor knows the tricks of perspective to take all of these elements closer to Frida's state of mind, in which art and life merge cinematically. The transition from Frida's psychological pain to the surrealism with which her conscience finds its way to her canvases is daring but not pretentious, and there is always something amazing and luscious to look at. I have seen it twice, and I found awesome discoveries both times. I have heard this movie called everything from a masterpiece to pure kitsch-which would probably have amused the wicked, fun-loving Frida immensely. Julie Taymor's vision of Frida Kahlo's life and art is as prankish as its subject-an artful echo of a lyrical, sensual, voyeuristic, anarchic slapstick tragedy.

Women's Desire

In Roger Dodger , a deft, cutting-edge comedy about an arrogant bachelor who uses women like dental floss until his strategies of seduction backfire and bust him in the teeth with his own fist, the terrific and bewilderingly underrated Campbell Scott gives a star performance that is nothing short of mesmerizing. Written and directed by a witty, observant newcomer named Dylan Kidd, the film centers on the neurotic fox trot performed nightly by New York's most sophisticated cads in their war with the opposite sex to see who comes out of the trenches with the least number of scuffs on their combat boots. You see cynical Casanovas like Roger Swanson every week on Sex and the City , breaking hearts but going home alone to preserve their love affair with themselves on the Bowflex machine. Roger is a handsome, rude, blunt, brilliant, obnoxious, conceited and lethally suave advertising-agency copywriter with no respect for women, who thinks he can con his way into any bed in Manhattan. He is also a know-it-all with an absolute genius for verbal diarrhea, whose idea of foreplay is a dissertation on every subject from human cells, gene patterns and Darwinian theories of evolution, to a florid analysis of the man who discovered the clitoris. ("At first, he thought it was India.") Then, in one night, his complacent world of cool talk and casual sex is shaken when he is (1) outsmarted and dumped by a stylish girlfriend (Isabella Rossellini) who is tired of being manipulated (and who is also his boss); and (2) invaded by his horny 16-year-old nephew Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), who has come to town to enlist the aid of Uncle Roger in a mission to lose his virginity. By the time dawn slices through their hangovers, the uncle is not so smug, the nephew is not so innocent, and neither of them will ever be the same again.

Rising to the challenge, Uncle Roger (who also needs to bolster his own wounded ego) condescendingly agrees to teach the kid all the angles in an all-night crash course on how to pick up women, but the two foxy tomatoes he hits on in a swinging-singles bar (Jennifer Beals and Elizabeth Berkley) wreck his foolproof strategy at every thrust, while the naïve Nick wins them both over just by being himself. The mood darkens faster than the desperation on Roger's face as the film moves to a stuffy penthouse party where he makes a boorish fool of himself, then to a sordid after-hours brothel where the roles of student and mentor take a grim detour, with dangerous consequences. The movie asks a lot of questions about what women really want, and makes the point that men still have a lot of growing up to do, regardless of their age.

The women are tough and vulnerable, the kid is lost but grounded, and Mr. Scott manages to show the human frailty behind the mask of conceit, winning sympathy even when he is most irritating. The understated direction is admirable, but if I have one objection, it's the overuse of annoying, claustrophobic closeups that reveal every pore without giving the viewer the benefit of a safe analytical distance. Even for a film on an indie-prod budget, there was surely enough money for the camera to film the occasional long shot. I liked Mr. Kidd's script, but it's extremely talky-and while the talk is sharp, it can be wearing. Still, Roger Dodger knows where it's been and where it's heading, refusing to settle for pat resolutions even in the epilogue. With his integrity and honesty, Nick turns out to be twice the man his uncle is, yet when the camera follows him back to school, there is evidence that the serpent's egg Uncle Roger laid in Manhattan is about to hatch a new reptile.