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Carla's Song

1996, Movie, NR, 127 mins

Carla's Song: Review

CARLA'S SONG
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Love can't conquer all in this leisurely tale of romance between a Scottish bus driver and a traumatized Nicaraguan refuge. For quick-tempered malcontent George (Robert Carlyle), rebellion is letting indigent passengers sneak a free ride on his bus and giving the finger to his bourgeois bosses at the transit authority. He meets Carla (Oyanka Cabezas) when she gets caught riding without a ticket, and refuses to let her slip out of his life. Why? It's hard to tell whether he's smitten with her exotic beauty or with the fact that she's destitute, displaced, troubled and conspicuously not interested in getting involved with him. But his persistent pursuit wears her down, though she refuses to give up her secrets: She makes him swear to stop asking about her past, her family and Antonio (Richard Loza), the ex-lover by whom she's haunted. George eventually realizes that if he and Carla are to have a future together, the past has to be dealt with. So they go to Nicaragua, arriving at the height of the 1987 guerrilla war between the grassroots Sandinistas and the U.S. government-backed Contras, and begin the search for Antonio. Rather than using revolution as a backdrop for a love story, director Ken Loach, working from a script by Paul Laverty (who spent 2 1/2 years in Nicaragua in the '80s), looks at the way relationships are determined by experience. In a more conventional film, the strength of George's love would save Carla from her tortured memories, but Nicaragua lays him low: The poverty, the violence, the cynical political forces playing fast and loose with helpless lives are more than he can handle. The movie's weakest link is Scott Glenn's performance as Bradley, an American human-rights activist with a shadowy past, but it's a minor liability. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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