12 • THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
FILM
THURSDAY, APRIL 24, 2003
Movie reaps mostly rave reviews
A teenager's love for soccer intrudes on her family's strict Indian traditions in Bend It Like Beckham, a colorful British lark playing at Lawrence's haven for must-see movies, Liberty Hall Theater.
Stephen Shupe
sshuve@kansan.com
Aaron Passman apassman@kansan.com
The ease with which Indian filmmaker Gurinder Chadha handles these difficult
I mention Liberty Hall, 642 Massachusetts St., only because moviegoers generally associate this theater with students who wear black on Friday and write esoteric poems at locally owned coffee shops. Bend It Like Beckham is more commercially viable than this venue implies. Its sheer sense of optimism could slap a smile across the face of any student caught in the doldrums of a closing semester, be it a goth, a jock or even those excitable types who see irrefutable parallels between Roy Williams and Judas Iscariot.
The smiles begin with the film's soccer-loving teen, Jess (Parminder Nagra), who may be the spunkiest black sheep in the history of movies. Jess worships professional soccer hero David Beckham — his pin-up posters adorn the walls of her bedroom in her family's affluent house in a London suburb — but her dream of going pro is suffering a serious setback with the impending wedding day of her older sister, Pinky (Archie Panjabi).
Jess is expected to marry, young and lavishly, just like Pinky, and it doesn't help that her outspoken mom (Shaheen Khan) offers annoying daily reminders of this manifest destiny. To further complicate matters, Jess meets a fellow dreamer, Jules (Keira Knightley), who signs her up for a local girls' soccer team, one that's sparked the interests of American talent agents. All at once, Jess' dream is both far from reach and closer than ever.
Jess and Jules' friendship gives the film its window into the racial harmony that exists today-Jules' white parents scarcely notice the skin color of their daughter's new mate. Even so, the lingering effects of segregation are fully evident in the character of Jess' father (Anupam Kher), who wants his family away from soccer, not because of his plans to have Jess married but because he too was once an athlete before racist fellow players chased him out of the sport.
Its plot may resemble My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but Bend It Like Beckham operates on a far more profound cultural level. It never preaches, but it's always conscious of entering new territory. After all, how many films have we seen about a Sikh family living, in relative prosperity, in modern-day London?
Bend It Like Beckham's sheer sense of optimism could slap a smile across the face of any student caught in the doldrums of a closing semester.
themes, along with the film's eye-popping use of trick photography during the soccer sequences and the head-bopping soundtrack filled with popular cover songs, combine to make Bend It Like Beckham as crowd-pleasing as movies get.
This would be more than enough for any
VS.
comedy (in an age where Anger Management can gross $45 million in its opening weekend, we don't seem to expect much from the genre), but as a ticklish dessert Chadha also directs appealing performers across the board
Shupe is an Augusta graduate student in journalism.
Allow me to burst the bubble. Bend It Like Beckham has gotten, for the most part, rave reviews from across the globe. My best guess is that I didn't see the same movie everybody else did because I left the theater unimpressed. Imagine, if you will, the Spice Girls in a Disney Channel movie about soccer.
It's not all bad just most of it. Imagine the Spice Girls in a Disney Channel movie about soccer.
Got that? If you do,you basically get the gist of Bend It Like Beckham.British girl
BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM
If Jess' familial woes grow repetitious in the film's second hour, Bend It Like Beckham hugely rewards minimal patience on the part of the audience. Its last 30 minutes are probably the most rousing movie moments you're likely to see before The Matrix Reloaded opens May 15.
GRADE FROM SHUPE ... A-
Nagra's smile is so blindingly beautiful it could light up the gloomy Chapter 11 aisles at Kmart. Just as radiant is Knightley (she played Natalie Portman's double in Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace), whose androgyny is never more apparent in the hilarious scenes where Jules' parents mistake the girls' friendship for a sexual relationship. Jonathan Rhys Meyers, the glam-rock poster boy from Titus and Velvet Goldmine, provides distraction of another kind as Jess' soccer coach and forbidden love interest.
GRADE FROM PASSMAN ... D
Starring: Parminder Nagra, Keira Knightley and Jonathan Rhys Meyers
Rated PG-13 for language and sexual content
Playing at Liberty Hall Theater, 642 Massachusetts St.
power and soccer, with a bit of culture clash mixed in for good measure, in the most family friendly so-called "art house film" of the year.
Bend It Like Beckham's contrived, Disney Channel ready, tissue-paper thin plot concerns Jess (Parminder Nagra), an Indian teenager living in Britain with her traditional Indian family. Jess' parents want her to learn to cook traditional Indian food, marry a nice Indian boy and in general live the life of her older sister Pinky (Archie Panjabi). Jess, on the other hand, just wants to play soccer (or football, in the vernacular), and her bedroom is a full-on shrine to British soccer star David Beckham.
Then there's Jules (Keira Knightley), characterized as a normal teenage girl, who spots Jess playing soccer in the park and invites her to try out for the local girls soccer team.
And you can guess where it goes from here: Jess' parents don't want her playing soccer, but she does it anyway, bonds with Jules and all the other girls on the team and discovers how much soccer means to her.
Of course it's not quite that simple,but
that's the gist of it. And the added details don't help things much, either. For example, there's a minor subplot about a love triangle between the girls' coach, Joe (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), and Jess and Jules, but it never really feels fully fleshed out.
Perhaps the film's most irksome moment comes midway through, when Jess sneaks away for the weekend to accompany the team to a tournament in Germany. Joe takes the team out clubbing after the game, and they all dance around to bad pop dance music in their ultra-stylish clothes with big unnatural smiles on their faces. It's a moment so unbelievably artificial that it seems to fit in perfectly with the rest of the film.
But wait, it gets better! Merely a few moments later, Jules catches Jess and their coach sharing a romantic moment! Oh, the betrayal! It was indeed at this moment when it really hit me that this movie would most likely be big with the 14-year-old Disney Channel crowd.
Everyone in the cast is pretty attractive. I mean it's a movie, right? They usually are. The problem here is that, during the soccer games, the camera is more focused on the girls' faces than on the actual soccer game.
Televised soccer games are shot from an extremely wide angle, so as to catch all the action. Bend It Like Bendham shoots the games so close up that you can barely catch any of the action but you can tell that all the girls are having a right good time.
It's not all bad — just most of it. The culture clash in Jess' family is done well, and it's not just a flash in the pan.
The filmmakers carry it throughout the film, and it's effectively done. It's just that this, the film's best aspect, is overshadowed by the sheer mediocrity of everything else.
But maybe it's just me. It seemed that most everybody else in the theater besides me loved the movie.
And if you're the sort of person that loses it at jokes like, "Get your lesbian feet out of my shoes!" then Bend It Like Beckham (or as I like to call it, "Girls Just Wanna Play Soccer") may just be the movie for you.
But for the rest of us ...
Don't believe the hype, kids. Take it from me, your old friend the film critic: Bend It Like Beckham blows.
Passman is a Towanda senior in journalism and film.