MOVIE REVIEW

Bend It Like Beckham  (2003)

Starring: Parminder K. Nagra, Keira Knightley
Director: Gurinder Chadha

Rating: PG-13

Studio: Fox Searchlight

Review Posted: 4.12.03

Spoilers: Minor/Major

Reviewed by Sara Michelle Fetters

"GOOOOOOAAAAAL!!!!!"

Too be entirely honest, I’ve been going through 2003 waiting for a movie to make me stand up and take notice. Sure, I’ve seen a few that I’ve mildly enjoyed – Phone Booth and Piglet’s Big Movie come to mind – but nothing that’s really knocked my socks off. In fact, I haven’t written a completely favorable review since last year. For a film critic, that’s not only completely lame but amazingly depressing as well, almost making one what to re-think their day job.

Rethinking over - jubilation begin. With the arrival of Gurinder Chada’s wonderful Bend It Like Beckham stateside, the fun is definitely put back into funtastic. This sports dramatic comedy about culture, gender, parents and growing up just might prove to be one of the year’s best and it easily rekindles my waning enthusiasm about making trips to the multiplex.

David Beckham is one of England’s premier football – soccer for those in need of translation – stars known for both his ability to bend a ball around defenders and into the goalie’s net as well as his high-glam marriage to a former Spice Girl. In many circles he’s a godly deity, lusted after as much for his Jordan-like skills on the football field as he is for his matinee idol good looks.

Jesminder "Jess" Bhamra (Parminder K. Nagra) is no exception. She loves Beckham and she loves the game he plays, so much so her bedroom is a shrine to the English superstar. In fact, she spends hours talking as if on the telephone to the giant portrait of the athlete hanging over her bed, letting him in on secrets she dare not tell her family. You see, Jess wants to play football. Not just for fun, but professionally, day dreaming about running breaks along side her hero.

But those are just dreams. She knows her strict Indian family would never allow her to pursue such a course of action. In fact, her mother (Shaheen Khan) would much rather she start acting like a proper woman and learn how to make a complete Indian Dinner – including both meat and vegetarian Aloo Gobi. With her older daughter getting married, mom’s focus is squarely on Jess now, and finding the girl a proper husband is at the top of her to-do list.

On the verge of letting football fall to the wayside, content to only ever being allowed to play in the park with a group of friends, a chance meeting changes everything and opens a door Jess didn’t even know existed. See, local girl Juliette "Jules" Paxton (Keira Knightley) has been watching Jesminder playing willy-nilly in the park, and she knows talent when she sees it, immediately inviting her to come try out for her local semi-pro women’s team.

Soon, Jess is wowing the other girls on the team – as well as their handsome Irish coach Joe (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, far sexier here than any man truly has the right to be) – with her fancy footwork and high caliber skills. Even better, her and Jules fast become best friends, discovering they have far more in common; Juliette’s girly-girl mother Paula (the simply wonderful Juliet Stevenson) is every bit as anti-football as Jesminder’s is; than they first thought.

But as happy as Jess is playing for the team, her family is just as aghast in the opposite direction. Her mother can not believe her daughter would stoop to showing so much leg in public and her father (Anupam Kher) just doesn’t want to see his daughter done in by racism as he once was when he came to England as a youth and a rising cricket player. As good as he was at the sport, no club would have him because of his race and although times have changed, he doesn’t want to see his youngest daughter meet a similar fate.

Now Jess is forced to make a decision between lying to her family and killing her own dream. With her sister’s wedding day approaching and an American scout from Santa Clara coming to town to watch her and Jules play, Jess must decide if she is going to try and grab for her dreams or let her family’s traditional values determine her fate.

For those of you unfamiliar with sports and cultural films of this type, lets just say Bend It Like Beckham is a movie where everyone comes out smiling. This isn’t a movie where the ultimate destination is all that surprising, it’s the getting there that’s the joyride, and this film had me grinning from beginning to end.

I really liked how Chada, Paul Mayeda Berges and Guljit Bindra’s script avoided most of the usual clichés inherent in sports films, instead relying on the complex family dynamics at the movie’s core to tell its tale. Sure Bend It Like Beckham has a BIG GAME final close to its conclusion, but it’s almost an afterthought. The real climax involves the constantly shifting relationships between friends and teammates, coaches and players and, most of all, children and their families.

It helps that everyone in the film is just so darn good. It’s hard to really be too mad at Jess’ parents, they really do feel as if they are trying to do what is best for their headstrong daughter, and Kher and Khan are perfect in their respective roles. In fact, Kher has the film’s most touching moment, realizing the profound pain his daughter is in as she stands stone-faced at her sister’s wedding. His actions are moving, not so much because they serve a purpose in the script, but because they seem born of genuine human fatherly emotion.

But Bend It Like Beckham is Knightley and especially Nagra’s show all the way. The two girls play off one another so well it’s hard not to be swept up in the swirling waters of their friendship. Nagra, in particular, controls the film like an expert. Her smile could light up a thousand light bulbs, while a look of anguish or hurt is enough to send even the strongest heart to the Kleenex box. She’s a revelation and I hope I get to see more of her soon.

Typical sports film clichés aside, Chada gets so much right here it’s hard to find much to fault. Sure the film is a tad too long and Jules’ family misinterpretation of their daughter’s spat with Jess as being a lover’s quarrel seems thrown in more to give Stevenson a bit more screen time than it does to move the plot forward, but so what? This is a movie alive with culture and energy and it moves to a rhythm I’ve seldom had the pleasure to see. It is awash in color and vitality, and is pure unadulterated joy good for nearly the entire family.

In a film year rife with disappointment, Bend It Like Beckham is pure bliss filtering sunlight into an April desperately in need of it. This isn’t so much a movie that has to be seen as one that needs to be cherished and celebrated. As movie making goes, Chada, Nagra, Knightley and company score a winning goal.

Rating: 3.5 out of 4

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