Carla's Song (1997)

Robert Carlyle (The Full Monty) stars as George, a Glasgow bus driver who risks his job by giving a free ride to a beautiful Nicaraguan woman with no money. From the moment that he sees her, George becomes infatuated.

I WORKED FOR ACCION PERMANENTE CRISTIANA POR LA PAZ IN 1987: SAME AS THIS FILM AND IT IS REAL

Coincidentally I worked in Nicaragua during the time and setting of this film and it is too real. I also knew Anita Setright who plays herself on our old front porch, although nearly ten years later as the film was made in 1996 or so. She still smiles benevolently in this movie. Seeing the contra attacks and their effects, the vehicles, and the walls and murals are very real to me. Too real.

Okay so the romance seems a bit hockey and the Paul Laverty narrative has a few gaps (how does she get quickly from her mother's house to La Experanza when the others have to hijack a bus? How does she learn really good English in only about seven months of exile in the British Isles? As an ESL teacher myself, I really want to know! How does Scott Glenn's character turn so quickly from CIA trainer in torture and attack one year to peaceworker the next, unless he's a CIA plant infiltrating the Accion Pte., as I so often suspected, and one by the way who makes stylistic criticisms of people's reports of contra war crimes: "We're Witness for Peace, not War and Peace"?).

And as many house parties as I attended, with cumbia and palo de mayo music, etc., I never saw anyone do a split. Nice to hear the Nicaraguan marimba.

Well, there's some holes in the narratives, especially in Glasgow (can a driver really empty and hijack the double decker bus to go for a joy ride with a new prospect? Can a double decker really drive on mud without flipping like an SUV or van? Can Paul Laverty ever get heterosexual love right?), but the action in Nicaragua could be newsreel; it could be straight from the photos and videos we used to record the contra atrocities funded and trained by the Reagan/BUSH administration and Ollie North and Negroponte (who has had such a high position in the current Iraq chaos - these war criminals do not get fired as they deserve; they get rehired!). In fact the action was really too real for me, except that Loach-Laverty always soften things up a bit. The US directed contra would have replaced Antonio's tongue with more intimate organs, as so often recorded, and not left him alive. Would Carla herself have survived her injuries out in the field?

Laverty and Loach do try to present socio-economic realities and projects in a dramatic and engaging way, but please do follow up with primary sources such as Christianity and Revolution: Tomas Borge's Theology of Life. Let this movie be a portal to the reality of this history and a warning for our present dirty little war. Nowadays all those old women and girls living out on the farming coop would be targetted for airstrike as insurgents, and my Catholic Church ambulance would not long have gone deep in the mountains and through the rivers as we always did (with me wondering how much longer). Sad the day we stopped to pick up the teeth of some beloved fellow parishioners, and the lady who ran the marriage orientations, after their pick up had hit a US supplied Claymore mine.

This movie bears much reality. See it. The Sandinista National Liberation Front candidate Daniel Ortega has again been openly, freely and fairly elected president of Nicaragua (twice more than Bush). La lucha sigue.

And I am another who wishes for English subtitles for the ancient Pictish English of Glasgow, possibly a locale because some residents there still wish for their own national liberation from London. An unstated irony. October 29, 2007

Absurd "Love Story" Mixed With Sandinista Propaganda

George is a young and irresponsible bus driver from Glasgow, Scotland. He ends up getting fired for, among other offenses, giving free rides to a Nicaraguan immigrant named Carla. George then becomes romantically obsessed with Carla and buys two plane ticket so they can go to Nicaragua and search for her ex-boyfriend Antonio. What the hell is this guy thinking? But wait it gets even weirder.

From there George follows her like a puppydog through various Nicaraguan warzones full of good guy Sandinistas and bad guy Contras before Carla finally discovers her lost love Antonio. Then George happily makes his way home to Scotland.

This most unlikely "love story" is also a Communist propaganda film. Yes, Somoza was a horrible dictator and Reagan, Oliver North and crew were certainly wrong to covertly and illegally fund the Contras, (remember the Iran-Contra scandal). But the Sandinistas were no saints themselves. They formed a totalitarian Marxist-Lennist government which censored the free expression of dissent and received military support from the Soviet Union.

Because of Reagan's funding of the Contras, American liberals, like myself, tended to romanticize the Sandinistas in the 1980's. But the truth is that they were just another corrupt, authoritarian Latin American regime, like Castro in Cuba or Chavez in Venezuela. Because of Cold War politics, the war in Nicaragua raged on for more than a decade and victimized the ordinary people of the country, who were murdered and brutalized by both Contras and Sandinistas. But this movie declines to present a balanced portrait.

By the way, I am still a liberal. But the maturity and education that have come to me with age, along with being married to a wonderful Latina, have helped me develop a more knowledgable and realistic perspective on Latin American politics.

It's hard to say which part of the film is worse - the totally ridiculous "romance" between George and Carla or the Sandinista propaganda. Also the thick Scottish accents in the early part of the movie are nearly incomprehensible and the second half of the movie is mostly in Spanish. Yet the film has no subtitles. Stay away from this one. August 14, 2007

What if?

As always, Ken Loach made of a simple story, a revealing, breathtaking and hard to forget movie around a Scottish bus driver and a Nicaraguan woman.

Inch by inch, a worthy film to watch.
October 11, 2006

Loach Not At the Top of His Form

The first Loach flick that left me somewhat unmoved. A Glaswegian buser falls for a beautiful yet shell-shocked Nicaraguan refugee. She had witnessed some of the contras' attrocities (they were trained and armed by the US military). Under his large socialist umbrella, Loach stays outside of the perimeter on this one. No particular depth of the story, little warmth save the obvious sympathy. He's done much better in his starker, more uncompromising and less "romantic" flicks such as "My Name Is Joe" or any of his early Brit working class masterworks. Still, even the sentimentally toned down Carla's Song, mostly due to the terrific Robert Carlisle (spelling?)-is highly watchable flick. February 24, 2006

Great film

In this film, Director Ken loach sucessfully crystalized his unshaken belief on humanity.
there's clear difference between his former film "land and freedom", both films descrive one indivisual goes through wartime in foreign country and the end of personal relationship they confront in the middle of chaotic situation. However, unlike "Land and freedom", the hero,Jorge,bus driver in Glassgow,never has been politically motivated character in the first place. He went to nicaragua together with his girlfriend, Carla, to help her to face her past by finding her ex-boyfriend and to overcome inner trauma and scar. Jorge eventully started being frustrated with his powerlessness against the inhuman crisis ongoing in her homeland.
Contrally to "land and freedom" The story moves on from personal reality to political reality. Yet more importantly, this film beautifully captures one's spiritual growth through relationship.

I think that's what makes this film so real, powefull and thought provoking one. August 31, 2003

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