By Osman Faruqi
This week British film director Gurinder Chadha, who produced, wrote and directed 2002’s Bend It Like Beckham, reflected on the movie’s cultural impact and legacy two decades since its release.
In an interview with the BBC Chadha invoked the memory of the 9/11 terror attacks in New York City, and described the film as a “great healing moment” for the world.
Parminder Nagra, left, in the role of Jess, and Keira Knightley, portraying Jules, in a scene from Bend It Like Beckham.Credit:AP
“I think that had a massive impact on how the film was received globally,” she said. “I think the world was quite shocked and beaten up by that, and here comes this innocent film that is trying to make people understand what it feels like to be different.”
Describing any single piece of art, especially a sport-themed romantic comedy, as something that could heal the world after an event as globally traumatic as 9/11 risks coming across as overly hubristic, to say the least. But in the case of Bend It Like Beckham it, if anything, actually undersells the film’s significance. And the clearest evidence of that is how, despite its enormous success at both the box office and among critics, there’s been nothing like it since.
What makes Bend It Like Beckham one of the best movies of all time?
It’s a relatively straightforward story: Jess, a high school student living in the West London suburbs is an absolute football gun but due to a combination of pressure from her more traditional Punjabi family and the lack of opportunities for women athletes, she can only show off her skills among friends in a local park. She gets spotted by another football player who signs her up to the local amateur women’s team, the Hounslow Harriers, which sets up conflict over culture, family and love.
The brilliance of the film (really the brilliance of Chadha) is how it weaves together a story where each individual thread and character is worthy of a stand-alone feature.
This could have been a movie about the struggles of women football players.
It could have been a movie about the clash between first and second generation migrants.
It could have been a movie about race relations in Britain in the early 2000s.
It could have been a movie about a (slightly creepy) love-triangle between a coach and his two star players.
The film is all of these things, with sophisticated subplots, (almost) perfect casting, one of the greatest movie soundtracks of all time and a climactic final sequence that juxtaposes the beauty of a traditional Punjabi wedding with the joy of winning a football final.
Bend It Like Beckham broke new ground when it came to representation
When I walked out of the cinema after watching Bend It Like Beckham for the first time (on my 12th birthday) I experienced something I couldn’t properly articulate until much later. It was the rush of seeing people like me and my family on screen. For South Asians living in the West, particularly Punjabis, it was one of the first times we’d seen our culture in a contemporary story that reflected our actual lives.
For South Asians living in the West, Bend It Like Beckham was one of the first times we’d seen our culture in a contemporary story.
For a Punjabi-Australian Muslim kid living in a conservative, overwhelmingly white town in regional NSW in the aftermath of 9/11, it was both shocking and extremely validating to see people who dressed and spoke like my family in a movie that was being warmly received by audiences of different backgrounds.
Chadha’s goal of making a film to try and “make people understand what it feels like to be different”, especially in a world as divided by hate as ours was during the War on Terror, resonated with a generation of migrant communities.
Bend It Like Beckham wasn’t just about the South Asian diaspora, it was for them. The film is packed full of Punjabi language and culture references that aren’t explained or subtitled. None of it detracts from the film’s overall story or impact, but it’s a loving nod to those of us watching who feel connected to this global community.
I can guarantee that no one else in my cinema back in 2002 had any idea what “aloo gobi” or a “gora” was, but references to Punjabi food and culture felt like a wink from Chadha to someone like me. “I know this movie is for everyone, but I see you – and it’s especially for us,” she was saying.
Everything from the Anglicising of names (“Jesminder” becoming “Jess”), the pressure from parents to become a respected white-collar professional and the examination of racism in sport were all themes that felt like they’d be ripped from the diaries of second generation South Asian kids living in Britain, Australia, Canada, the US and New Zealand.
As much as we’re rooting for Jess, we come to understand her parents’ reluctance to embrace her desire to be a football player isn’t just based on outdated conservative stereotypes, but a fear that she’ll be let down by a society that doesn’t respect her for who she is – a brown woman trying to play professional sport. Fast-forward 20 years and consider, were they that wrong?
As if Bend It Like Beckham wasn’t already jam-packed with social commentary, it also manages to touch on sexuality and how it relates to migrant identity, which not only felt radical for 2002 but is a theme still underexplored in pop culture.
The best soundtrack of all time
Speaking of pop culture, no conversation about Bend It Like Beckham is complete without heaping praise on the film’s soundtrack. The choice of songs, which Chadha says were all on her playlist at the time, echoes the thematic intertwining of cultures we see on screen.
Blondie, Mel C, Basement Jaxx and Victoria Beckham sit alongside iconic Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, bhangra beats from B21 and Bally Sagoo and Punjab’s answer to Do The Conga, Rail Gaddi.
If all of that doesn’t sound fun enough, throw in Texas’ all-time banger Inner Smile, Nessun Dorma and Curtis Mayfield’s Move On Up (I like to imagine that Kanye West was watching Bend It Like Beckham when he decided to sample Mayfield for his hit Touch the Sky), and without a doubt you have the best soundtrack of all time.
The film was released around the same time as the modern bhangra revival took off in Britain in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Just a few years earlier Panjabi MC had recorded Mundian to Bach Ke for his 1998 album Legalised.
After Bend It Like Beckham brought Punjabi culture to the fore, the song was released as a stand-alone single a few months later. It sold millions of copies around the world and was remixed by Jay-Z.
Chadha had somehow managed to inject Punjabi culture into the world of professional football and Brooklyn hip-hop.
The legacy of Bend It Like Beckham
Considering the film’s enormous critical and commercial success, Hollywood’s failure to capitalise on the cultural and social conversation it was tapping into is all the more obvious.
The only bankable stars to come from the movie were the white ones. Keira Knightley (also probably the worst actor in the movie) went on to lead roles in The Pirates of the Caribbean, Love Actually and Pride & Prejudice.
The next most successful actor from Bend It Like Beckham was Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who plays the coach, Joe, who later starred in big-budget action film franchises and TV shows including Mission: Impossible III, The Tudors andVikings.
Meanwhile, the film’s main – and best – actor, Parminder Nagha, bounced around straight-to-TV films for a few years before landing recurring roles in ER and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. A fine career, sure, but a far cry from the blockbuster success of Knightley and Rhys Meyers.
Nagra and Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Bend It Like Beckham.
A film like this in 2002 was seen as a rare oddity rather than something to emulate. That’s slowly changing with the rise of actors such as Dev Patel and Mindy Kaling, but the fact that it’s taken two decades to get just to this point is still an indictment on how disconnected mainstream cinema is from the lived reality of millions of people around the world.
In fact it’s Chadha herself who has done the most to keep telling these kinds of stories. She followed Bend It Like Beckham with the very silly and fun Bride & Prejudice, a Bollywood reimagining of Austen.
In 2019 she released Blinded by the Light, a film based on the life of Pakistani-British journalist Sarfraz Manzoor and his love of Bruce Springsteen. The parallels to Bend It Like Beckham are clear, though the film’s setting in the 1980s allows Chadha to explore the resurgence of the far-right and provide sharp parallels with our current moment.
But we can’t keep relying on Chadha to carry the flag, she’s already done more than her fair share. The real legacy of Bend It Like Beckham is that it proved that films about race, class, family, love and women’s sports could be fun, thought-provoking, and make lots of money.
It’s way past time for us to have plenty more of them.
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