Nancy Taaffe: Loach’s Best?

[Socialism Today, No 16, March 1997, p. 30]

Nancy Taaffe reviews the latest film by socialist director, Ken Loach.

Carla’s song is the latest joint venture between director Ken Loach and writer Paul Lavery. The film tells the story of George (Robert Carlyle) and Carla (Oyanka Cabezas) and is primarily concerned with the relationship that developes between these two characters.

George’s attempts to add sparkle to the monotony of his job as a bus driver land him in trouble with the bus company bosses. A chance meeting with Carla coupled with the mystery that surrounds her previous life provide the impetus for a change of direction for George and the adventure of a lifetime.

The character of George is the figure through which Loach has chosen to make this remote subject accessible to the British public. The story moves from the grey damp streets of Glasgow to the war-torn villages of Nicaragua.

Loach successfully motifs the politics onto the love story. Sometimes he does this in a very subtle way, such as the way working class life can stifle talent and spirit or it can be in a more overt way such as when a peasant recounts the benefits of land reform under the Sandinistas. The film is very different from Loach’s last film, Land and Freedom, which strove to highlight the different approaches to the revolution in Spain by various left organisations. In this film Loach has chosen two central themes to concentrate on. Firstly he wants to show how the Sandinista government made a real difference to the lives of ordinary people, how they tried to ensure that every village had a health centre and a school. The flip side to this story is how the CIA, Ronald Reagan and Oliver North moved heaven and earth to destroy this show of democracy in the US’s back garden. Set in 1987 the film shows how the USA-backed Contras were illegally armed and financed as the powers that be tore up every bit of the US constitution to ensure that it should be so.

The shots of guerrilla warfare compare with any Hollywood Vietnam film, in that they reflect the suspense and horror which characterised this dirty war.

In typical Loach style he manages to find humour and light in a seemingly desperate situation. A particularly humorous scene is one where Carla and George rest at a women’s centre. In the main hall is a mural of a woman with a rifle over her shoulder while a baby suckles at her breast. There are women soldiers just hanging around the centre, they are dressed in military uniform and equipped with guns. They strike up a conversation with George, who has been momentarily left on his own, they giggle and flirt with him, asking him whether he has a girlfriend. The innocence of this scene is smashed by the arrival of children on stretchers who have been attacked by Contra forces on a bus. The film successfully captures human frailty as well as resiliance and it manages to tell the story in a political context.

With the film’s obvious anti-imperialist stance and the Nicaraguan war being so much a part of our recent history, it is little wonder that Carla’s Song has been unable to find a distributor in the US. When one senior US distributor was recently asked about Carla’s Song he said. ‚I’ve seen it! I loved it! It’s a wonderful movie‘. When asked whether they would distribute it, he said, ‚Well no. We’ve got a plateful of work at the moment and this movie needs very special attention‘.

For a non-political audience the love story and the search for the mysterious Antonio is sufficient to keep an interest. For a political one the interplay between the good story, which is foregrounded, and the politics, makes for an enjoyable film. Although quite different from his previous films, I would be as bold as to say it is one of Loach’s best.