# Carla's Song (1996)

### reviewed by
Louis Proyect

I feel betrayed by Ken Loach, one of my favorite film-makers. His "Carla's Song" not only fails as art, it also fails to convey the political significance of the Nicaraguan revolution, its purported subject. Since Loach's "Land and Freedom" dealt so trenchantly with the politics of the Spanish Civil War, it is a major disappointment to find politics so poorly served in his Nicaragua movie.

The fault is in Paul Laverty's screenplay. He is a Glasgow lawyer who worked with human rights organizations in Nicaragua in the mid-80s. This sort of involvement does not necessarily mean that you are going to dwell on the Nicaraguan people as victims of atrocity. Unfortunately in Laverty's case this is the singular message he conveys.

This comes across most clearly in his strategic esthetic decision to make the sad eponymous Carla the central character of the film. It is 1987 and we find ourselves in bleak, rainy Glasgow. There we discover Carla (Oyanka Cabezas) on a sidewalk dancing to a boom-box. She begs for change after her performances. She somehow became detached from a Nicaraguan dance troupe touring the British Isles and is now barely functional. She is rescued by George, a completely apolitical bus driver who soon falls in love with her. He brings this wounded bird back to a friend who will shelter her in a spare room in his apartment. Robert Carlyle, who plays George, also played a junkie construction worker in Loach's great "Riff-Raff," as well as the psychopath Begby in Danny Boyle's "Trainspotting."

Shortly after taking up residence in her new quarters, Carla cuts her wrists. After George takes her to the hospital, he discovers from a doctor that this is her second suicide attempt in six weeks. She is apparently suffering from post-traumatic stress. As he sits by her bedside, George can not resist taking a look at her medical record. It states that a horrible battlefield incident has almost destroyed her psychologically. This incident not only had a scarring effect on her, it also had lasting damage on her lover Antonio.

In flashbacks, we see the contras mounting an attack on Antonio, Carla and a group of young artists and teachers who are traveling by truck in the northern mountains of Nicaragua. They are part of a literacy campaign that the contras have targeted. The attack does even worse damage to Antonio than it does to Carla, but we do not know exactly what it is. This mystery serves as a central dramatic device in the movie and it is not a very good one. Since we do not encounter Antonio as a key player in the drama, it is difficult to have great feelings about his plight. He is a symbol of Nicaraguan suffering and symbols work far better in poetry than they do in movies.

Nearly half of the movie deals with the love affair of George and Carla. They talk about everything but politics. Nicaragua only functions as a faraway place where something terrible happened to her and her lover Antonio. What a contrast to "Land and Freedom," where the two lovers are a Communist and a POUM member, who live for politics. Carla, the Sandinista militant, does not seem to be much of a politico herself. Her defense of the revolution amounts to a statement that the government is trying to help the people and bad people are trying to stop it.

Laverty has obviously made the decision that middle-class audiences in the wealthy countries will only swallow the bitter pill of Nicaragua's suffering if it has a sugar coating: George and Carla's romance. At a certain point, George decides that their love can never be consummated as long as she is still uncertain about Antonio's fate. Therefore, he decides to fly back to Nicaragua with her and search for Antonio.

Thus the second act of the movie commences and it is where things begin to derail completely. Loach has the look of Nicaragua in 1987 nailed down, but there is not much substance beneath this. Filmed in Esteli, "Carla's Song," is highly faithful to the period and the place, as anybody who visited Nicaragua in this period can testify. The Sandinista soldiers are constantly on the move as they seek out in the contras in the countryside. The human rights activists bustle about and convene meetings to come up with documentation on contra atrocities.

Alas, what is missing is exactly what made Nicaragua memorable, namely political conviction. For the entire time these characters spend in Nicaragua, nobody discusses politics. The main topic of conversation is what has happened to Antonio. The movie is not really that much about Nicaraguan revolution, as it is the search for a missing person. George and Carla roam from town to town asking "Have you seen Antonio?" If Laverty had devoted some energy to the search for the soul of the Nicaraguan people, then the movie might have been interesting. Alas, this was beyond him.

In one of the most glaring false notes in the film, we finally encounter somebody who knows the whereabouts of Antonio. That is Bradley, played by Scott Glenn, a member of Witness for Peace. Glenn is a thoroughly unlikable character and one can only wonder how the human rights veteran Laverty could come up with such an unflattering portrait. Perhaps some misgivings about the whole tarnished Nicaraguan experience might have affected Laverty's judgement. We are living in a period when it is awfully easy to bash the Sandinista cause.

In any case, Bradley seems to have very little interest in politics. He thrives on gonzo brinksmanship and goes into the most dangerous parts of the countryside to document contra atrocities. When he sits down to have a beer with George, he stresses how dangerous it is and warns him that he might shit in his pants if he gets close to the shooting. Suffice it to say, that no staff worker with Witness for Peace ever made macho displays like this. What motivated them was a religious belief in human rights and a broadly defined sympathy for Nicaragua's social revolution. We eventually discover that Bradley had been a CIA operative in Honduras who had become disgusted with what he was doing and went over to "the other side." This information is simply revealed by Laverty's screenplay without any dramatic background into Bradley's character. As such, it comes across as sheer nonsense.

Someday somebody will make the definitive movie about Nicaragua and they will not have to rely on specious devices such as a love affair between one of "us" and the "other." Nicaraguans are capable of telling their own story. A movie based on Omar Cabezas' memoir "Fire in the Mountains" could not miss. Cabezas was a guerrilla who gave up everything to fight against the Somoza dictatorship. When he is not describing a fire-fight with the enemy, he is reminiscing about all the things he has left behind and misses desperately: the food, the drink, the parties, the sex. Since Nicaraguans are some of the most joyous people on the face of the planet, this part of the story has added poignancy. It is too bad that Loach chose such a depressing and inaccurate story, since there are so many better ones available.

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