‘Carla’s Song’ unfolds slowly> Acting performances make the wait worthwhile for film to hit its groove

CARLA’S SONG directed by Ken Loach, written by Paul Laverty. Running time: 127 minutes. Rated R (language, violence, adult content). Showing Dec. 15-18, Railroad Square Cinema, Waterville.

“Carla’s Song” opens with a hazy, lingering shot of a double-decker bus pushing through the polluted streets of Glasgow, Scotland. Pay attention to the smoke and to the soot hanging over the city, washing over the bus, and curling around those rushing through the busy streets and breathing the rotten air. Director Ken Loach wants you to feel all of the dirt and all of the grime that accompany human struggle.

This film, his first since the award-winning “Land of Freedom” hit theaters in 1995, is being touted as “a love story with a political background — a film about a journey that begins on a Glasgow bus and ends in Nicaragua amid the gunfire and explosions of war.”

It is a good film that initially tries our patience with minor plot problems, gaps in character development, and dialogue spoken with such strong Scottish accents that at times it’s almost impossible to understand the film’s characters. Bear with it — eventually the film hits its groove within the jungles of Nicaragua, where the unsettling truth about the Contra-Sandinista war is found to lie within the tangled undergrowth of our own government.

The film opens in 1987 with a chance meeting of a warm, kind-hearted Glaswegian bus driver named George (“The Full Monty’s” Robert Carlyle), and a young, beautiful waif named Carla (Oyanka Cabezas), who slips onto George’s bus without paying. Initially, George is willing to overlook the nonpayment, but when an inspector gets on at the next stop to check tickets, George finds himself defending the woman, who suddenly flees the bus — but not before stealing George’s heart.

When George happens upon the woman a day later, he is so drawn to her that he follows her, eventually enters into a relationship with her, and soon is traveling with her to Nicaragua in an effort to find out what happened to her family and to her former boyfriend, whom she still loves.

For Carla, the bloody rituals of war have long since left their damaging marks; when she returns to her native land, she does so with a numbness that breaks only when she is faced with the reality that her family and her boyfriend might be dead. But for George, confronted for the first time with almost certain death, being lodged in the midst of a war he doesn’t fully understand forever changes him and his view of a world he now sees through harder eyes.

“Carla’s Song” is being distributed throughout the United States by Shadow Distribution of Waterville. It may depend too heavily on our memory of a war that took place 10 years ago, but it features fine performances and is worth your time.

Grade: B.

Video to Avoid

FACE/OFF directed by John Woo, written by Mike Werb and Michael Colleary. Running time: 140 minutes. Rated R (Strong violence, language, adult content, genuine boredom).

Near the end of John Woo’s unfortunate film, “Face/Off,” Nicholas Cage, perhaps sensing that no one will ever take him seriously again, seems at once desperate and embarrassed when his character is forced to explain a portion of the film’s plot to an actress who is as incredulous as we.

In a mad, awkward fit of giggles and tears, Cage grimaces in shame at the camera: “It was insane!” he shouts, his bottom lip quivering as he slaps his face for no apparent reason. “The assignment was to enter a federal prison as Castor Troy. A special-op surgeon gave me Castor’s face, and then somehow Castor came out of his coma and killed everybody who knew about the mission but not before transforming into ME!”

Egad. And they say art is dead?

This supremely overacted film is loosely about FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta), who agrees to switch faces with his archenemy, Castor Troy (Cage), in an effort to defuse a bomb Castor has planted somewhere in Los Angeles. Along the way, things go predictably awry before ending on a note that is so sickeningly sweet diabetics should beware.

That this film was one of this summer’s biggest blockbusters is a sad, telling commentary on the times and on our culture. There is not a subtle moment, a shred of good writing, nor a believable character in the film, which could have been a wonderful parody of a weakening genre if only it hadn’t taken itself so seriously. Indeed, in its attempt to be visually artistic by presenting a hive of sweeping, uninteresting camera angles and silly sound effects, “Face/Off” becomes nothing more than the artistic equivalent of a backed-up toilet in need of plunging. A more appropriate title for this rental would have been “VCR/OFF.”

Grade: F.

Christopher Smith, a writer and critic who lives in Brewer, reviews films each Monday in the NEWS.