THERE’S a nice whiff of anticipation coming off “Ask the Dust,” but you can’t live on anticipation. Watching it is like being in a restaurant where the waiter brings out a luscious platter of food, then keeps walking right past you. All night long.

The setting is 1930s Los Angeles, where wannabe novelist Arturo Bandini (Colin Farrell) gets himself a cheap room in a dive and starts doing what us writers do best: not writing. Instead he stares at the pages as they don’t fill themselves and sizes up his last nickel, which he takes into a bar to splurge on one last cup of joe.

That’s when he meets this dame Camilla, see, a Mexican waitress (Salma Hayek) with eyes like honey and a tongue like battery acid. The cream for his coffee has gone bad, and pretty soon so does their relationship. He hates her shoes. She hates his manners. Ain’t love swell?

The script is wise, plenty wise, for a while. The picture was directed and written by Robert Towne, from John Fante’s novel, which Towne came across while he was writing “Chinatown.” This one nails both the setting (tooth powder comes in a metal canister) and the words: In a town of people from many lands, everyone speaks fluent Raymond Chandler. “Camilla’s one pony who’s worth the ride,” Arturo is told. A guy in a car that just misses Arturo yells out, “Learn to dance if you can’t walk.”

A third hand enters the game – the bartender, who the girl says is a friend, but seems like the kind of friend who knows how she likes her toast in the morning – and then a fourth, a high IQ floozy (Idina Menzel) who once overheard Arturo analyze Sinclair Lewis in a bar, then followed him straight home.

Maybe we’ve got two love triangles. Or a love rectangle. Maybe it’s a case of mistaken identity or double indemnity. Will the postman ring twice? Somebody get me a knife so I can cut the tension.

The trap that’s waiting for us is: There is no trap. The tension fades away in all directions, kinda like the dreams you had when you were young, and for the last hour we get stuck watching two stiffs doing an audition for “The Way We Were.” The ending is so soft-boiled your granny could eat it without her dentures, and the big idea is this: People should be nice to each other. Next time you wanna send a message, kid, try Western Union.

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ASK THE DUST

[**] (Two stars)

It’s not Chinatown, Jake.

Running time: 115 minutes. Rated R (sex, nudity, profanity). At the Lincoln Square, the 64th and 2nd, the Loews Village.