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BEND
IT LIKE BECKHAM
5/10
UK
2002 : Gurinder Chadha : c100 mins
It’s
Chadha’s stated aim to make ‘accessible, commercial movies’ and there’s
no doubting the calculating savvy behind Bend It Like Beckham.
Mike Bassett and
Mean Machine have
shown that footy pictures are no longer box-office poison, and Chadha
aims to attract the youth, female and Asian markets with her tale of talented
teenage striker Jas (Parminder Nagra) who must overcome her ‘respectable’
family’s objections if she’s going to follow her chosen career.
Chadha
also seems to have at least one eye on the America, where women’s football
has mushroomed in recent years. The film’s title name-checks arguably
the world’s most famous and talented star, and the US represents, for
Jas and her friends, the promised land where they can turn their skills
to lucrative professional advantage. There’s clearly more than a little
bit of autobiography to this angle, as Chadha herself left Britain to
make What’s Cooking?
in the States.
Like
that movie, Bend It is an enjoyable, relentlessly upbeat, slightly
old-fashioned picture which unobtrusively explores families, cultures
and societies. There’s nothing wrong with Chadha’s intentions or her conventional
approach, and many audiences will have as good a time watching the film
as the cast and crew seem to have had making it (they appear in a typically
bouncy final sing-along montage). But, unlike, say, Gregory’s Girl,
there may not be too much here to detain viewers who fall outside the
target demographic of teenage females.
Apart
from some incidental shots of aeroplanes taking off overhead (Jas’s family
live near an airport), their promise of escape recalling Ray’s use of
trains in Pather Panchali,
Bend It Like Beckham isn’t much to look at. When Chadha tries anything
out of the ordinary the results are clumsy, such as the opening dream-sequence
in which Jas is digitally inserted into TV footage of a real Man United
game. The strong points are the script and the cast – the engaging Nagra
is a real find, and she gets able support from Jonathan Rhys-Myers (a
rare non-freakish role as Jas’s Irish coach), and the ultra-reliable terrific
Frank Harper as her best pal’s bemused dad.
The
title perhaps says it all: in cinematic terms, Chadha’s much more interested
in bending the ‘rules’ of film-making than breaking them - but doesn’t
this make Beckham a somewhat inappropriate reference point? His is a dazzling,
inspirational, freakish talent – Chadha, however, is solidly dependable,
but she’ll probably never come up with anything especially exciting or
memorable: a second-eleven Paul Scholes, perhaps.
9th
March 2002
(provisional version seen 27th January, CineWorld Milton Keynes)
by Neil
Young
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