Boot it like Billy Elliot (Bend It Like Beckham (DVD))

Member Name: andrewl

Product:	Bend It Like Beckham (DVD)
Date:	09/01/04 (141 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Women and football, together at last!

Disadvantages: Marketing, Nothing else

It's such an obvious idea that I'm surprised no one's done it before. After all, what are the two things that men are supposed to talk about above all others? Football and women. Bringing the two together is such a sure-fire hit it's barely worth mentioning, plus you don't even alienate the chick-flick market. A football-related film that anyone can enjoy in a World Cup year. I suspect the brains behind this film are going to be receiving generous offers for their services.

Much as Billy Elliot did a couple of years ago, Bend it Like Beckham tells the story of a teenager with an innate talent they are driven to pursue despite the misgivings of their family and immediate community. It's a talent that goes against pre-conceived notions about their sexuality, and leads to many hilarious consequences.

However, while Billy Elliot's scenes of hardcore ballet might well have been better suited to the big screen than the beautiful game, few can deny that Jess's colourful family have much more audience appeal than a bunch of thick miners beating each other up in the kitchen. And it's also great to see a film of this nature remaining accessible to Britain's Indian communities, who make up a massive proportion of the cinema-going public, and frankly get a pretty shoddy deal in terms of films addressing their culture.

So, Jess (Parminder Nagra) can play football a bit. But her extremely traditional parents believe she should be staying at home making chapatis. Or rather, her mother does. Her father's a little more sympathetic. As with Monsoon Wedding, the matriarchy is alive and well in Jess's household, and the repression of women that is frequently cited as a concern about Asian societies in general is shown to be at least a little bit self-imposed.

Anyway, amid preparations for her townie sister's wedding, Jess joins a girls' football team on the recommendation of her new friend,
played brilliantly by Keira Knightley. Despite being described as a newcomer alongside Nagra, Knightley has been quietly making a name for herself for some time now. While we might not have noticed her stand out as the decoy queen in Star Wars: Episode One, her performance in the under-rated Hole was quietly fantastic, possibly as she didn't have Thora Birch's problem of disguising an American accent.

Anyway, from now on things become fairly predictable, but still great fun. Initially keeping her training secret, Jess gets caught out again and again, getting into ever deeper water with her relatives, and putting her sister's wedding in severe jeopardy when the future in-laws believe they see her engaged in lesbian activities. She takes a few penalties, gets involved in a love triangle with Knightley and the team coach and eventually sorts herself out, thanks to her father, best friend (token nice gay friend) and the virtually psychotic insistence of her coach.

With brief cameos from Gary Lineker and Alan Hansen, and an almost briefer turn from former All Saint Shaznay Lewis as the team captain, the film is quietly fairly smug with its winning combo of attractive women and football. But there are still some fantastically funny moments, for example the free kick where the opposition's wall is transformed into Jess's female relatives in traditional Indian costume miming to the Three Tenors. You've got to love the background lunacy.

At the same time, you've also got to love the frankness about racial tensions. The girls' team is carefully diverse from an ethnic point of view (ie, they have a token black player (Lewis) and with Jess a token Asian as well, but no one larger than a size 10), but their opponents occasionally resort to racist jibes against Jess. When she complains about this, her Irish coach pretty much shrugs and says he gets it all the time. And the relationship between India and Pakistan is als
o amusingly dismissed when one of her team-mates asks Jess if she's allowed to marry a Muslim. The attitude of the film to racism seems to be that it exists and it sucks, but it's best to ignore it.

A bigger target is racial ignorance, one which is embodied by Knightley's Mum, who does her best to be welcoming and friendly towards her daughter's Indian friend, but ends up by assuring her warmly that they had a nice curry a few days previously. Every scene with Juliet Stephenson in is fantastic, as she comes to believe that her daughter is a lesbian, and then attempts to learn the offside rule.

The film's other THEME is that it's better to belong to a distinct team. It doesn't matter what team that is - Jess's football team is juxtaposed with her family's distinct culture. There's one shot of her street at night, with her house lit up brightly, alone in a section of bland suburbia. Belonging to a team makes you more attractive, more interesting and more confident (shown most improbably in Jess's sudden U-turn in her attitude towards a massive childhood scar).

So, we have a film with great acting, some really attractive girls (I'm sure I won't be the only one to say this, but Nagra looks a lot better when playing football than she does in the scene where she decks herself out for a party), some football (I'm not a football fan, but it is effectively filmed) and a lot of comedy. It's already been massively successful (at the time of writing it's still out-performing Star Wars in our cinema), and that success should go some way to redressing the racial ignorance of Middle England towards Indian culture (the extent of which is horrifying). A subtly didactic masterpiece. BUT: I hate the poster. The tag-line: who wants to cook aloo gobi when you can bend a ball like Beckham. It sucks. The whole point is that Jess is trying to reconcile her Indian heritage with her sporting ambitio
ns, shown most clearly when she's pratting around in the kitchen. She's trying to have the best of both worlds, rather than turning her back on her family.

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