Rent Carla's Song (1996)

Latin Lovers - Carla's Song review by Steve

This is the middle film in an unofficial Ken Loach trilogy set in conflicts overseas- with Land and Freedom (1995) and Bread and Roses (2000). While these are all polemics from his usual socialist perspective, there's an impression of the director moving away from his comfort zone in the politics of UK and Ireland.

Plus there's adventure in far off locations! It's curious he made a picture about the civil war in Nicaragua a decade after it was in the news. Maybe it was because he found a plausible amateur actor in Oyanka Cabezas to play a Sandinista exiled in Scotland, still traumatised by the brutality of CIA backed Contras.

Plus it gives Loach the opportunity to condemn US interference in central America and across the world... and really, this is the message which still resonates. He benefits from a familiar lead, with Robert Carlyle as an impetuous Glasgow bus driver who falls in love with the refugee and travels with her back into the war.

So Loach gets to choreograph battle scenes in Nicaragua and make a pitch as an action director. Yet the story lacks credibility and the agitprop doesn't cut through. What this mainly offers now is nostalgia for a time when we might expect the British working class to express solidarity with political asylum seekers.