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'Bend it Like a Beckham'

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Starring: Keira Knightley, Parminder Nagra
Director: Gurinder Chadha
MPAA rating: PG-13 for language and sexual content
Running time: 112 minutes
Release date: April 4
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Photo Courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures

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Film centering on soccer-loving Indian girl in England is at times both heartwarming and disappointing

By A.O. Scott
The New York Times

Posted: April 4, 2003

"Bend It Like Beckham," a genial ethnic sports comedy directed by Gurinder Chadha, was a big hit in Britain last year, and Fox Searchlight deserves credit for releasing it in this country with a title that will be, to much of the American audience, utterly incomprehensible.

Beckham is David Beckham, star of the Manchester United soccer team (and the husband of one of the Spice Girls). The observation "nobody bends it like Beckham," from which the title derives, apparently refers to his ability to curve the ball past the opposing goalkeeper.

The line is reverently uttered by Jess (Parminder Nagra), the younger daughter of a family of middle-class Punjabi immigrants (by way of East Africa) residing in a London suburb. Jess' passion for soccer puts her at odds with her parents who, while not hidebound traditionalists, nonetheless think sports are an improper pastime for an almost-grown teenager with marriage and university to think about.

Her older sister Pinky (Archie Panjabi), whose wedding is approaching, is puzzled that Jess does not share her boy-crazy, shopping-centered approach to life. So when Jess, recruited by her new best friend Jules (Keira Knightley), begins to train with the girls' auxiliary of a local football club, she precipitates a culture clash that ripples outward from her own household and becomes more and more complicated until the big game comes along to sort it all out.

The title, and some of the local dialect, may require a bit of translation, but the film's warm-and-fuzzy amalgam of multiculturalism and feminism will look very familiar indeed. It is stuffed to bursting with affectionate stereotypes and the sticky, somewhat oppressive Gemutlichkeit that is the hallmark, at least on screen, of immigrant families, wherever they come from and wherever they reside.

Chadha's previous movie, "What's Cooking?" made this point fairly explicitly, as it dropped in on the Thanksgiving dinners of a series of families -- Vietnamese, Mexican-American, Jewish and African-American -- living in the same Los Angeles neighborhood and struggling through a series of domestic crises. If "Bend It Like Beckham" had focused on Pinky rather than Jess, it might have been "My Big Fat Sikh Wedding."

Its cheery inoffensiveness, though, is in some ways disappointing. The South Asian diaspora has inspired some exceptionally clever and cosmopolitan movies from the likes of Hanif Kureishi and Mira Nair, and coming after "Monsoon Wedding" and "My Son the Fanatic," "Bend It Like Beckham" seems like a step backward.

Modern life, for the characters in Nair's or Kureishi's films, is a vortex of contradiction and confusion, and their stories unfold with an appropriately swirling, dizzy rhythm. But Chadha prefers the schematism of the sitcom, in which humor and pathos are carefully and predictably rationed, and people have the capacity to change but never to surprise.

The girl-power plot is built, curiously enough, on a scaffolding of mild misogyny. Both Jess and Jules are held back by their shrill, overbearing mothers, who insist on outmoded norms of femininity while the dads, when the chips are down, are patient and supportive.

The cast acquits itself with exemplary good humor. The tiny Nagra, her mouth set in a pout of determination, has a charming, disarming directness that steers the movie through its easily foreseeable complications. But rather than risk allowing her characters to blossom into full human oddness, Chadha saddles them with cute mannerisms and binds them together with curlicues of plot, all of which are feverishly tied together by the end.

It is not enough that Jess develop a crush on her coach (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), which makes her Jules' romantic rival. It must turn out that all three are having communication problems with their parents, problems that will be happily solved after the big game, the big wedding and the big montage that conjoins them. If Chadha's direction were as compulsive as the writing (she collaborated on the screenplay with Guljit Bindra and Paul Mayeda Berges), "Bend It Like Beckham" might have been tighter, funnier and, above all, shorter.