Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Having been curious about British film-maker Ken Loach since 1967 (when "Poor Cow" did not play anywhere near me), I have seen three of his movies in the last few months (Kes, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Carla's Song). A DVD bonus feature on The Wind that Shakes the Barley made me seek out "Carla's Song," which was partly shot in and around Glasgow, Scotland and partly shot in Nicaragua while US-sponsored terrorism was raging.

The movie is set in 1987. In the first part, a free-spirited Glasgow bus driver named George Lennox with little patience for rules (played by Robert Carlyle, best known as Gaz in "The Full Monty" and as Begbie in "Trainspotting") allows a Latina street musician (Carla, played by Oyanka Cabezas) to ride his bus without paying her fare — and gets in trouble for it when a fare-verifier inspector boards.

George tracks her down and woos her (including hijacking his bus for a visit to the Scottish countryside). He finds her in a bathtub full of blood and in the hospital learns that she has made earlier suicide attempts. Obviously, she has considerable post-traumatic stress, so what could be better therapy than taking her back to Nicaragua, where she lost the man she loved (guitarist Antonio)?

George, who speaks no Spanish, pushes a quest to find out what happened to Carla. An American who is documenting contra terrorism, having earlier been involved in training the contras, Bradley (Scott Glenn) reluctantly helps, though regularly urging both George and Carla to go back to Scotland.

A town where they are staying experiences Contra attack (targeting the school and the health clinic, which were typical Contra targets) so there are enough explosions for the popcorn audience.

In addition to portraying what the real Ronald Reagan was up to (along with deregulation of financial institutions) the movie is one of those that comes down on the "it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all" side, though there is considerable pain in both the major love stories. (There's also a lot of culture shock on display — Carla's in Scotland, George's in Nicaragua.)

I guess that because George does not speak Spanish, a lot of what he hears in Nicaragua is not subtitled. I would have appreciated subtitles for the Glasgow part (not Carlyle, but for his character's Glasgow friend Sammy, played by Gary Lewis (the father of/in Billy Elliot) whose accent I found mostly incomprehensible.

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Along with "Walker," portraying a 19th-century American adventurer who visited great sufferings on Nicaragua, the second part of "Carla's Song" is one of the few movies made in Nicaragua, a very beautiful, very poor country that has endured massive US interference throughout most of its history, including lengthy US occupation and decades of support for the particularly kleptocratic Somoza family rule. (Congressman Charlie Wilson was the last major advocate of the Somozas and an advocate of funding the Somocistas who fled. The US point man in funneling money to the Contras was John Negroponte (then ambassador to Honduras, where the Contra bases were; more recently appointed by George W. Bush first US Director of National Intelligence, and now Deputy Secretary of State;; see http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB151/index.htm on some of his activities as ambassador to Honduras), whose PR man, Robert J. Callahan, George W. Bush's current ambassador to Nicaragua, an appointment that shows open contempt for the Sandinista president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega. Like Gioconda Belli, I think that it is unfortunate that Ortega's is the faction of the Sandinista movement that is in power, but compared to our own president's misrule and that Negroponte is a high government official instead of standing trial in the Hague, it is difficult to be very critical of Ortega.).


© 2008, Stephen O. Murray



Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD