Posted: 03/31/2003

Bend It Like Beckham

(2003)

by Parama Chaudhury

An Indian family in London tries to raise their soccer-playing daughter in a traditional way. But her dream is to play soccer professionally like her hero David Beckham.

Coming as it does, at this late stage in the progression of films about the Indian diaspora, Bend It Like Beckham will, without fail, suffer from two kinds of adverse comparisons. The first group of critics will note that this movie has a taste of My Beautiful Laundrette, without any of the complexity. They will point out how Bend It Like Beckham presents setups similar to My Son the Fanatic, but never asks any of the important questions thrown up by the surroundings. The other group will contrast it with Monsoon Wedding, citing along the way, how Bend It Like Beckham dishes up cardboard stereotypes rather than fully developed characters like Monsoon Wedding’s ever-suffering father of the bride. What both these groups of critics fail to appreciate is that this movie is not a cinematic achievement, or a painstaking study of a community in flux. Bend It Like Beckham is that surpisingly rare object in current cinema: a fun movie with no hang-ups.

Bend It Like Beckham is a sports movie and a family movie rolled into one, featuring a heroine who is torn between her devotion to soccer—on second thought, let’s just call it footie to preserve the cultural vibe—and her desire to prevent any friction at home. Parminder Nagra is Jess a.k.a Jesminder Bhamra, sports-loving daughter of traditional Punjabi parents. She plays in the park with the local boys, and is recruited for a local girls’ team by Keira Knightley’s Jules, another player on the team. Her parents are, of course, livid; after all, Jess has college and marriage to think about. So Jess takes the path blazed by so many rebellious teenagers before her, and starts playing without telling her parents. The Hounslow Harriers, as Jess and Jules’s team is called, go on to play in Germany and the two girls are spotted as new talent. In the meantime, both girls develop a crush on their cute Irish coach, Joe, played by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. This hurts their friendship, while Jess’s sister’s upcoming wedding manages to crush any hopes Jess had of playing in the championship final. But of course, this is a feel-good movie, so you know that things will pan out in the end and we will be treated to a raucous family celebration, resplendent with riotous color, along the way.

What differentiates Bend It Like Beckham from its genre is director Gurinder Chadha’s sense of proportion. All of the gooey “I believe in you” and “whose life are you living” speeches are kept mercifully short, and for every happy accident, Chadha slips in a few good-natured laughs. On first glance, Jess’s parents may seem like the ultimate stereotypes of immigrant parents in the new world, but the tightness of the script and Anupam Kher and Shaheen Khan’s comic timing make them appear as merely worried guardians who expect trouble but are willing to put up with most of it. After all, Jess didn’t have too difficult a time convincing them to come around in the end, all things considered. Chadha, probably best known for the 1993 charmer, Bhaji on the Beach, makes another smart decision at the end by including selected outtakes and candid shots of the cast and the crew along with the credits at the end. Even if you thought that things had gotten too formulaic and the ending was too much of a fairy tale, this peek at the people who made the movie endears them to you and by the time you leave the theater, you are willing to forgive them any minor shortcomings. Extra bonus for ex-pats and those who have any interest in British soccer: current skipper Beckham makes a seen-but-not-heard appearance and former great Gary Lineker features as a television sportscaster in Jess’s daydream.

Like Kher and Khan, Jules’s parents also put in a very creditable performance. The amazingly versatile Juliet Stevenson plays Jules’s mother who despairs at her daughter’s lack of interest in push-up bras, and ends up convincing herself that Jules and Jess are having a lesbian affair. Frank Harper, who plays Jules’s father, has a much smaller role, but is convincing as the football-loving father who goes to every one of his daughter’s matches. In fact, Jules and Joe are the weakest characters in the film. Knightley looks like Winona Ryder, and for the most part, she acts as coy and affected as Ryder’s usual characterizations. Similarly, Rhys-Meyers’s Irish accent seems to be underlined over and over again, perhaps to drive home his apparent charm. The rest of the cast, particularly Archie Panjabi as Jess’s sister Pinky, do their bit to piece together the cultural backdrop; Panjabi punctuates each statement with an “Innit?” and the other younger characters drop their consonants with gay abandon.

When you think about it, Bend It Like Beckham is your typical blockbuster family movie, which is why comparing it to movies like My Beautiful Laundrette don’t make sense. Maybe if the title had been a little more transparent for American audiences—David Beckham is England’s soccer captain, a demi-god in the sceptred isle, and he is known for his ability to bend a free kick around a wall of defenders and into the goal—this would have been more apparent. Once we have established that, it becomes easier to appreciate Bend It Like Beckham for what it is: it’s fun, it tries its hand at uplifting moments, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Rather than deride it for not reaching the heights achieved by notables like Hanif Kureishi and Mira Nair, we should value this film as a well-made audience-pleaser.

Parama Chaudhury is a graduate student, an ex-writing instructor and a budding freelance writer based in New York City.

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