Carla's Song (1996)

One day, a bus driver named George saves a woman who had not bought a ticket. This becomes the beginning of a friendship, which quickly turn into something more. The woman is named Carla and she comes from Equador, a war-torn country. She is deeply traumatized, but George helps her to recover, and even takes her back to Equador, to find the people she left behind, especially her old lover, Antonio.

George is played by Robert Carlyle, and he does a great and believable job. This guy has no hidden motive, except that he wants to help Carla, and sure, along the way, he finds himself in love with her. This movie is full of strong emotions and takes us from tears to laughter, to tears. These people are alive and not just created for the sake of our entertainment.

Ken Loach, together with Mike Leigh, are two of my favorite directors when it comes to personal and emtional stories. They always have something to say and don't just make movies for the sake of it. Their images are not particular beautiful, but they are honest.

_Last words... big story, carefully told. Allow yourself to be emerged in Carla and George, and you are in for a special treat.This movie won't be for everyone, but everyone should see it and realize that movies can be... more._

We always used the number 18 so would never have encountered "George" (Robert Carlyle) driving his number 72 bus through Glasgow in the late 1980s. He's a bit of a maverick, hates his supervisor and is always walking a fine line between his job and the dole. Then one trip he encounters the penniless "Carla" (Oyanka Cabezas) who originally hails from wartorn Nicaragua and after a bit of an altercation that sees him suspended, they become friends. He learns something of her predicament and of those close to her back home, and so decides to take her back to see if they can't find out just what happened to her family and her boyfriend. They arrive to meet her hardened American friend "Bradley" (Scott Glenn) and his eyes are soon being opened very wide by signs of oppression and violence that put his Saturday night drunk Glaswegians on his bus into a truer perspective. From this point on, you can sense that there are no guarantees that sunlit uplands are likely to emerge for "Carla", but that neither are going to abandon their search for the truth. I can struggle with Ken Loach films. I find he all too readily conflates social realism with socialism and I'm not always convinced that the results are that far removed from the conclusion he wants to draw, but perhaps because there is a poignant and characterful rapport between Carlyle and Cabezas here, I felt this less manoeuvring and more of an honest depiction of life (and death) in a land being used as a political football by people who cared little for the impact of their policies in rural, largely undeveloped and agrarian, communities. Carlyle is at his most charismatic here and though Glenn is as wooden as a tent peg, as usual, there is something really quite human, touching and strong about "Carla" and her song and thankfully the actors don't have to resort to American accents to deliver an international dimension to this film.