by Brendan Foley
Release Details
Carla’s Song is now available in a limited edition of 3000 units from Twilight Time.
No one chooses whom they connect to in life. You don’t choose where you’re born, or to whom, and you don’t choose the people who stumble into your life and lodge there. There are people in my family, or who are my friends, that I look at and try to fathom the weird twists of fate and genetics that resulted in us being in a room together, let alone getting along.
When George (Robert Carlyle) notices Carla (Oyanka Cabezas) being hassled on the bus that he is driving through a busy Glasgow, he can’t have any idea who she is. He just sees a woman being bullied and he steps in to help. That chance meeting results in a relationship that ends up taking George across the world to bear witness to horrors he couldn’t have imagined.
Carla, you see, is a refugee from Nicaragua, her country torn apart by the U.S.-backed Contra insurgency. What happened to Carla left her physically and emotionally scarred, all but completely broken. George finds himself inexorably drawn to this woman and to her pain, and he becomes determined to help her in the wake of whatever trauma she will not speak about.
Carla’s Song is divided into two halves. The first half charts the steadily growing bond between George and Carla in Glasgow, as he wins her over only to realize the depth of damage that the civil war in her home country has left her with. When he learns that much of Carla’s despair is rooted in the unknown fate of her former boyfriend, George pushes her to track the guy down and finally make peace with the past.
Carlyle is probably still best known for his work as the sociopathic Scottish brute Begbie in Trainspotting, and many of his later roles have traded in on the ever-present killer glint in his eyes (side note: A movie that makes fantastic use of that, but that never gets talked about? Ravenous. See Ravenous, folks, and bring your kids [side-side note: do not bring your kids to Ravenous]). But he’s at his most utterly sympathetic here, playing George as a man of everyday decency, the kind of man who does the right thing because it is the right thing and will not waver. George could have easily been a blank, but Carlyle enriches the character with gestures of a genuine life, making George’s strength all the more meaningful because it feels honest and earned. He’s just someone who is so open to connection, so ready to bond with anyone and everyone, that you want to see his kindness remain unbroken by the film’s end.
Carla is a trickier character because we know so little about her. Even by the film’s end, director Ken Loach has only allowed us a small window into this woman’s life. There are seemingly tossed off moments in the second half that radically changes everything that came prior. It’s a delicate balance, to make Carla the mystery of the film that requires solving, without losing sight of her as an actual human being. Cabezas’ tremendous performance makes sure that Carla registers, and that her pain and loss actually hurt.
Carla’s Song is an iffy proposition, because it does theoretically fall into the “momentous tragedy through the eyes of a white person” subgenre of drama. You know, like how Ed Zwick’s Glory reminded us all how difficult life for black soldiers in the Civil War was for Matthew Broderick. Or how Ed Zwick’s The Last Samurai really captured how hard the downfall of Japanese culture was for Tom Cruise. Or how Ed Zwick’s Blood Diamond helped audiences understand how horrific the Sierra Leone Civil War was for Leonardo DiCaprio.
Man, fuck Ed Zwick.
Theoretically, Carla’s Song is on that same spectrum, seeing as it uses a white, European main character to contend with a South American conflict. But Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty are better at their jobs than Ed Zwick is, and they make sure that the film is about how little George actually understands about, or can help with, what is happening with Carla. When the film does finally bring Carla face to face with the past, neither George nor Loach’s camera is allowed through the door. We and he can only watch from the distance, catching a glimpse of beauty and horror but not welcome to actually participate.
There’s other good stuff in Carla’s Song to make it worth the viewing. Scott Glenn pops up as a hot-tempered American ally, Bradley, and he’s always a hoot. And the film’s brief depictions of the conflict are genuinely harrowing, especially since not knowing anything about the civil war at the heart of the film lends the second half of the film an almost nightmare-logic at times. You don’t know who the men in camo are when they come bursting through the trees and start spraying death everywhere, so you’re right there with George and Carla as they panic.
Carla’s Song is a lovely film about the way that we are both broken and redeemed by whom we connect to in the world. A love can survive a country ravaged by war, a chance meeting can open up an entire new world. We’re an odd group, us humans, and the lives we build with each other are even odder.
Available at Screen Archives Entertainment.