By Anne Billson
YOU KNOW when you're sunbathing and you spot a dark cloud on the horizon and watch it coming closer with the depressing knowledge that sooner or later it's going to rain all over your parade? Well, it's been like that for me with Carla's Song.
Lord knows I try hard not to harbour preconceptions about what I'm going to see, but from the moment of that first press release back in 1995, announcing that Ken Loach's new film was going to be about the romance between a Glaswegian bus driver (Robert Carlyle) and a Nicaraguan refugee (Oyanka Cabezas), I've been living in dread.
And now the day of doom has arrived. Carla's Song is here. It's set in 1987 and filmed in time-honoured social-realist drab-o-rama style. The first hour is pure On the Buses, with Carlyle cocking a snook at his moustached employers and - quite rightly - getting the sack for throwing his elderly passengers out on to the Glaswegian street so he can take the Nicaraguan chick he fancies on an impromptu jaunt to Loch Lomond.The second half, set in Central America, is all Nicaraguan nose-flutes, with happy peasants dancing and singing and learning to read until the Contras come along and spoil it all. Almost as an afterthought, American actor Scott Glenn is wheeled on to deliver a thuddingly dull lecture about CIA-backed atrocities committed against innocent nuns and children.
The irony is that, whereas atrocities were undoubtedly committed, and whereas the American tendency to ride roughshod over international law and human decency in its meddling in the politics of other countries is to be deplored, one can't help but feel relieved when the Contras roll up and launch a mortar attack.
I'm sorry, but there it is - whenever I feel myself being lectured, I turn into a card-carrying philistine. I can't believe it was the intention of Loach or his writer, Paul Laverty, to put audience's backs up, but if they wanted to make a public information film they should have made a documentary, not a clunky, broken-backed, half-baked drama populated by wooden mouthpieces instead of living, breathing characters.
I'm not proud of finding Carla's Song a crashing bore. I just wish British film-makers made films to which one could look forward with a modicum of excitement. Hollywood walks all over the British Film Industry this week, and without even trying.
There's more radical social comment in Ransom's little finger than in the whole of Carla's Song.