Carla's Song.

Produced by Sally Hibbin; directed by Ken Loach; screenplay by Paul Laverty; cinematography by Barry Ackroyd; production design by Martin Johnson; edited by Jonathan Morris; music by George Fenton; starring Robert Carlyle, Oyanka Cabezas, Scott Glenn and Gary Lewis. Color, 127 mins. A Shadow Distribution release.

While Ken Loach's Land and Freedom featured the internecine battles of the Spanish Civil War of the Thirties, the travails of Sandinista Nicaragua in 1987, chronicled in Loach's recent Carla's Song, are even more remote for most North Americans. The electoral defeat of 1990 ended the rule of the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN), which has unraveled as a dominant political force ever since, following internal strife, including the recent lurid charges of sexual abuse against former President Ortega. Once the contra war ended and the Sandinistas relinquished power, Nicaragua disappeared from the front pages of newspapers, buried in the rubble of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Carla's Song resurrects that forgotten time when the contra war was still raging.

Loach collaborated on the script with a Glasgow lawyer, Paul Laverty, who worked in Nicaragua during the Eighties as a human-rights monitor. Well aware of the human suffering caused by the contra war, he became frustrated by the difficulty of combating the American media's promotion of the contra cause. Laverty suggested to Loach that the project could "give shape to just one of those thousands of statistics, and tell his or her story set against the real backdrop of Nicaragua."

This dual focus on the personal and the political explains the film's oscillation between a love story and incidents detailing the "real backdrop of Nicaragua." The film's opening lays the groundwork for the eventual convergence of these two strands. A young bus driver named George (Robert Carlyle) offers to pay the fare of a young woman named Carla (Oyanka Cabezas), who appears unable to speak English. George's sense of justice leads to a week's suspension, and eventually his dismissal after he commandeers the bus for a picnic outing with Carla in the hills outside the city. After a suicide attempt by Carla, George learns that this Nicaraguan dancer remains haunted by the atrocities of the war in Nicaragua, in particular the memories of Antonio, the boyfriend she left behind. As the love story of George and Carla develops, George recognizes that Carla cannot recover until she confronts her feelings of Antonio. Hence, he buys tickets for Nicaragua, where the rest of the film takes place.

As in Land and Freedom, Loach foregrounds a naive male protagonist who encounters a committed, experienced, and attractive female character to guide him through the confusion and violence. Furthermore, the couple comes together romantically, not ideologically, for the man knows virtually nothing of the complexity of the real situation. Interestingly, the man leaves a girlfriend behind in both cases, suggesting the erotic pull of war. Both films, then, try to use a conventional narrative form in order to draw a wide audience to an examination of ideological struggles.

No doubt Loach believes that the film's linkage of love and war is more than a mere rickety plot device. Loach and Laverty are obviously more concerned with informing audiences of Nicaragua's troubled past and the rewriting of history which demonizes the Sandinistas and neglects the criminal war sponsored by the United States. The film endeavors to set the historical record straight by cataloguing - and at times celebrating - the good works of the Sandinistas. On the plane to Nicaragua, for example, Carla's return to her homeland triggers a flashback to her happy days with Antonio in a literacy brigade. Once in Nicaragua, campesinos insist on showing George their new title to land. Carla's friends are active in the local Sandinista women's organization and teach literacy to campesinos. Throughout this journey, George, who speaks no Spanish, trails after Carla as an onlooker.

While championing the ideological virtues of the Sandinista project - agrarian reform, literacy, and women's newfound militancy - the film succumbs to a certain schematic didacticism. Each encounter instructs George - as well as the audience - about the Revolution, but does not change the relationship with Carla. The search for Antonio, moreover, takes them from the city into the countryside, the terrain of the most horrific violence of the war. Carefully instructed by the CIA to wage a campaign of terror against civilians, the contras specifically targeted health-care workers, farmers on cooperatives, and other Sandinista centers of progressive social change. The protagonists' descent into hell is explicitly designed to immerse us in the reality of a war which was obscured during the Reagan Administration with a massive disinformation campaign that eventually imploded in the Iran-Contra affair.

By ludicrously maintaining that Nicaragua had become a Soviet puppet threatening its neighbors with Marxist revolution, the United States transformed this country of three million people into the Cold War's last battleground. Understandably enough, in an attempt to correct these distortions, Loach and Laverty endorse the policies of the revolutionary government. Unfortunately, the didicaticism of Carla's Song precludes a more nuanced examination of the Sandinista experiment. Loach and Laverty overlook Nicaragua's real internal political tensions, since the Sandinistas faced opposition within the country, and not only from former Somocistas and the United States. In fact, the FSLN, self-professed vanguard of the revolution, progressively lost popular support not exclusively because of the war and the attendant convulsions in Nicaraguan society. Particularly in the countryside, the Sandinistas pursued economic policies which alienated sectors of the rural population. Some peasants even joined the contras in response to such measures as the imposition of collectivized forms of farming. While such strategies were intended to improve the lives of Nicaraguans and were not coercive (no one was forced to join cooperatives), many campesinos resisted these intrusions into their traditional way of life. Furthermore, the application of these policies often led to real economic hardship for campesinos, such as lower compulsory prices for their products offered by the state purchasers, failure to provide transport of their produce, and even forced relocation of communities from their familiar surroundings. The campesinos in Carla's Song who proudly display their land title obviously support the Revolution's policies; many others did not.

The film refers briefly to one such problem, but fails to pursue it in detail. When Carla asks her friend Rafael about the fate of Antonio's family, she learns that one of Antonio's brothers has been killed while fighting with the contras. Loach and Laverty's Manichaean representation of the war cannot account for such an unlikely character. How could any Nicaraguan, let alone a brother of the saintly Antonio, support the evil contras? A more nuanced narrative, which acknowledged the well-known fact that families throughout the country were split by the war, could have taken us closer to the real politics of the revolution and the war.

Although the film's version of history is overly simplified, it manages to successfully capture the texture of daily Nicaraguan life, a feat that eluded earlier films shot in Nicaragua such as Alsino and the Condor, Latino, Walker, and even the Nicaraguan Specter of War. Arriving in Nicaragua, George is disoriented by the chaos of the Huembes bus station in Managua, and the sequence's tight shots of tortilla makers and beverage vendors emphasizes his confusion. The buses are bulging with passengers, often carrying the overload on the roofs. Bars and restaurants operate out of nondescript houses with few amenities beyond some chairs and tables set up haphazardly on dusty porches, as Nicaraguan beer magically appears out of hidden interiors. Vehicles are constantly breaking down, repaired in makeshift ways until the next malfunction. Houses are extremely bare inside, with little furniture and often without electricity. Loach neither sanitizes nor dramatizes this poverty.

In an admirable reversal of standard conversion scenarios (Under Fire, Missing, Salvador), George does not decide to become an internacionalista recruit to the Sandinista Revolution. Instead, he realizes that he cannot commit himself to this foreign cause. Loach and Laverty refuse to imbue this doomed love affair with any sense of redemption; Carla must stay behind, since she cannot abandon either her country or her beloved Antonio.

The enigma of Antonio's fate lies at the center of the narrative. Bradley (Scott Glenn), a former CIA adviser who works as a Witness For Peace, ultimately informs George that Antonio was brutally tortured by the contras. Since Carla witnessed her lover's agony, she fled her trauma by remaining in Europe after her dance troupe's European tour. Antonio, appearing only at the end, functions as an allegorical condensation of what was done to the Sandinista project - suffering, paralysis, disfigurement, and silencing. By turning Antonio into an allegorical figure, the film further weakens the love story of George and Carla - George is not competing with a real person, but with a damaged country that he can never hope to repair.

Even though Carla's Song awkwardly grafts a love story onto an expose of the contra war, the film succeeds in evoking the popular optimism of the Sandinista Revolution and conveying the brutality of its defeat. Ken Loach deserves credit for upholding the hopes of the anti-Stalinist left during the post-Cold War period. Films which examine the internal tensions of the Sandinista regime remain to be made, but Loach's film at least bears witness to the most recent Good Fight.

Jonathan Buchsbaum

Jonathan Buchsbaum teaches film and media studies at Queens College, CUNY, and is currently completing a book on filmmaking in Nicaragua during the Eighties