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Carla's Song
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Looking at
a film by the British director Ken Loach gives me an opportunity to confront
certain tenacious resistances within myself as a film viewer and critic:
resistances to this particular filmmaker, and also to a particular kind of
film. I've often talked about movies – popular, populist movies – which I
describe as 'wilfully politically incorrect'. I'm thinking of movies with a
certain proud, vulgar kick to them, like The People vs Larry Flynt (Milos Forman, 1996) or Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996), movies which set out to loudly defy some censorious
community standard of taste or decency or politeness.
In the
past, this kind of aggressiveness, often a specifically working-class attitude, was directed at vague but powerful enemies like
the establishment or the rich or the Church. What's weird in the ‘90s is that
the enemy of populism is usually posited as some liberal-minded, left-wing,
university educated intelligentsia – an intelligentsia that includes feminists,
artists and probably even a few film critics. Everybody gangs up on such
lefties these days, everyone from conservative politician John Howard to
political commentator Robert Manne, with many stops in-between.
The cry
goes up that these suspiciously brainy lefties secretly run everything, from
ABC public radio and television and the public service to the education system;
that they brainwash the rest of us with their precious, delicate, middle-class
values; and hand out every government grant to one or other of their lefty
chums.
I have my
problems embracing this kind of witchhunt of the politically correct, because
this attack is often a kind of scapegoating or smokescreen. I'm not sure that
left-liberal intellectuals have all the power that they are claimed to have.
But, for all that, I cannot deny that there is some populist, aggro,
ex-working-class kid in me, too, that does enjoy kicking against a certain very
recognisable form of left-wing puritanism. Whether the left is secretly ruling
this country or not, there is no question that one can come up against its
particular brand of puritanism in many places.
Now, what's
all this got to do with Ken Loach, the guy who made Kes (1969), Days of Hope (1975) and Land and Freedom (1995)?
Well, It's the instinctive anti-puritan in me which
sneers just a little every time I take myself off to a Loach film – or a John
Sayles film, or a Mira Nair film, like her woeful effort, Kama Sutra (1996).
The source
of my resistance to such directors and their films is a chicken-and-egg thing.
I'm not sure what comes first: my reflex disdain for the political attitude of
their films, or my instinctive recoiling before the dead, terribly ordinary and
illustrative cinematic language that they use. I've always found this to be the
case: that a certain rigid, over-prescribed political value system in movies
goes hand in hand with a lack of feeling for cinema itself. That lethal
combination doesn't only happen on the left-wing side of culture; there are
plenty of deadly earnest right-wing movies too.
Friends
have told me that if I don't like Loach's films, it's because I haven't seen
the very best ones, such as Riff-Raff (1990).
Maybe they were right, because I have finally encountered one which has shaken
my long-held anti-Loach resistance: Carla’s
Song. What was that resistance based on, precisely? In Loach's weakest
movies, such as Raining Stones (1993), the plot often comes over like an illustrated
political lecture based on old-school Marxist principles. Loach is notorious
for inserting little message-bearing sermons into his movies: sermons about how
the media brainwashes the working class into submission and consumerism, or
tirades against the various networks of working class power.
These
sermons and lectures have a very 1950s trade-union rally ring to them – and
it's not surprising to me that many of Loach's most fervent champions are
lefties from that period, now rather nostalgic over the lost revolutionary
certainties of their youth. I'm not knocking that nostalgia entirely; I'm
probably going to be all misty-eyed and nostalgic about postmodernism, disco
music and Brian De Palma movies by the time I hit fifty.
My greater
problem with Loach, down the years, has been the way he works small-scale
personal stories into his Big Picture political canvas. I've always found the
personal element in his films, the aspects to do with love, family, and
friendship, a bit dutiful and grudging. It's as if Loach felt he had to put
that there, but his heart just wasn't in it. Loach's failure to connect here
looks very much like a consequence of the old-left Marxist critique of
Bourgeois or Romantic Individualism. It's as if, for Loach, to get all worked
up over personal, individual stories is somehow to be
fatally distracted from the real, social issues at stake, issues that are
bigger, more pressing than the petty crises of mere individuals. That’s what I
regard as left-wing puritanism, and I hate it whenever and wherever I encounter
it. But then again, I would hate it,
because, after all, I am a tenacious Romantic Individualist.
If I've
made Loach sound like some kind of dinosaur here, the values that he represents
for me are by no means extinct. There's a certain left strain that persists in
much film criticism today, and the keywords in this tradition are precisely
‘the personal and the political’. If there is any film which combines a
personal story (such as a love story) with a large historical event – like a
war or a revolution or the Holocaust or even an election – then you can bet
your life that certain reviewers will be falling over themselves to wag their
finger and say: this film privileges the personal over the political, it
reduces politics to a mere backdrop.
In recent
years, it's been said about Schindler's List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), about The English Patient (Anthony Minghella,
1996), about Beyond Rangoon (John Boorman, 1995), about a hundred films. Sometimes I've
found myself saying it too, for want of something more intelligent to say. In a
previous era, people would have said that the film erases the collective drama,
the drama of a nation or a class or a community, in favour of an individual
drama. This is a rather foolproof line of attack, since most movies do tend to
be about two or three main characters, rather than three hundred or three
thousand or three million characters. But the bogus idea that collective
stories are politically better than individual ones persists in the praise that
Sayles' movies routinely get: movies like Matewan (1987) or City of Hope (1991) that have a big, generous canvas of characters or,
rather, an equal-opportunity smattering of representative social types.
Carla's Song takes me away from such angry,
possibly defensive thoughts. Watching it, I kept thinking in happy bewilderment:
what on earth has finally cracked inside this guy? Because Carla's Song features sweet love scenes – by which I mean a sex
scene – from the man whose films have been militantly sexless up until now. It
features those love scenes, and it also features an entirely daggy rapport
between its characters. Above all, it demonstrates an extraordinarily pained,
compassionate feeling for how individual desires and destinies do not always
hold fast to the true path of revolutionary history.
Of course, Loach
and his writer Paul Laverty still have an impeccably left-wing political
agenda. Carla's Song is set in 1987,
and tells the tale of a tentative, fraught relationship between George (Robert
Carlyle), a Scottish bus driver, and Carla, a Nicaraguan refugee (Oyanka
Cabezas, in her only film role). George is a kind of everyday rebel, always on
the wrong side of the authorities. In his own way, he figures as Loach's hero
of the people, the ordinary guy with a natural, instinctive moral and ethical
conscience.
The film
begins with a set-piece that would normally get all my anti-political-cinema
alarm bells ringing. George defends a passenger who can't pay her fare – it’s
Carla – from a bullish bus inspector. In its own intimate, everyday way, this
is a set-piece dramatising an issue, a moment of social justice – or injustice,
if you like. I've come to realise that such scenes are probably amongst the
hardest to do well in movies. So often they're handled in a smarmy, morally
absolute fashion: the good citizens line up against their bad masters, and we
in the audience are left in absolutely no doubt as to which side we should be
on.
So many
politically motivated films turns into didactic
cartoons at this point – cartoons that preach to the already converted. When
Loach does his scenes of social injustice in Carla's Song, you know full well where he stands: but these scenes
have a messy reality about them that is intensely satisfying.
As a result
of this incident on the bus, and other pranks such as hijacking the bus for a
country picnic, George loses his job. At least he is now free to explore his
romantic individualism – his, and Carla's. Theirs is a very tentative, fraught
relationship – George is only one step away from harassing her, and Loach
doesn't shy away from that complication. But love, finally, does begin.
Something is calling Carla away, however: her homeland, and the continuing
struggle in Nicaragua, but above all, her lover, mysteriously lost somewhere
in the fire between Contras and Sandinistas.
She has to
go back, and George, opening up to some strange, new impulse, goes with her. He
goes, knowing full well that she may end up with her former lover. He now faces
that painful, lived discrepancy between the personal and the political. On top
of all that, he quickly realises he's one naïve bunny, stuck in the middle of
Nicaragua without a prayer. His naïveté is confronted by a fascinating
character, a dark, driven American aid worker played by Scott Glenn, the likes
of whom we've never seen in a Loach film: he's a mesmerising, demon-lover
figure, and we are left to wonder what his relationship to Carla is, or was.
So there
are personal mysteries and intrigues in this film – secrets and revelations all
the way down its narrative line, which is new for Loach. There are more of
those difficult, tearing vignettes of social injustice, happening now on the
larger and more tragic scale of a country at war. There are also delightful
recurring situations, almost running gags, as when George hijacks a bus for the
second time, only now amidst the gunfire and confusion of his new, adopted
home.
Never
before has Loach opened himself up to the expressive possibilities of such
melodrama, or such human comedy. And never before has he given such tender
expression to the fragile interactions of love, passion and friendship between
his characters. It's one of those films that is sad,
wrenching and desolate, but also somehow uplifting in its testament to the
human spirit, and to the spirit of song, dance and humour.
Carla's Song is, in fact, more like George's
song: the typical left-wing story of an outsider who is brought to a salutary
point of political consciousness, of awakening in a strange and troubled land.
But part of the beauty of this story is that, no matter what, George is always
still George – just that bus-driving lad with his wits about him, and a heart
so big it's ready to burst.
The beauty
and importance of Carla's Song is
that it breaks a certain deadlock in the way that we tend to think about the
personal and the political. Because it's not just a few film reviewers who keep
starkly posing these two realms against each other as antagonistic entities:
movies themselves collude in this vicious split, and so does a lot of social
and political theory.
Everywhere we find stories and statements that reinforce this shocking, crippling assumption – the assumption there is a great chasm between love, sensation and art on the one hand, and society, history and politics on the other. But it's never been this way, really, and there are movies like Carla's Song or Bertrand Tavernier's masterpiece Life and Nothing But (1989), which show us how vitally indivisible the personal and political are. MORE Loach: Ae Fond Kiss, My Name is Joe, Sweet Sixteen, The Navigators © Adrian Martin May 1997 |
