Who wants to cook chapattis when you can bend a ball like Beckham?
If you're 18, love Beckham and can bend a ball like him the world's your oyster, right? Wrong. If you're Jess Bhamra (Parminder K Nagra) - 18, Indian and a girl - forget it. Do you think your marriage-obsessed folks will let you play a man's game?
If you're Jules (Keira Knightley) - 18, Anglo and a girl - that means going to the USA where the girls get paid, get sponsorship and get proper respect. Jess and Jules are well on their way with help from their coach, Joe (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), until they both fall in love with him...
Special Agent Matti
Chicks can play sport, too, it just isn't as interesting. Why? Because men have forced women into passivity for so many millennia that no-one expects women to be worth watching? Because women lack the testosterone poisoning that drives male athletes? Because women don't try to maim each other in non-contact sports? Because women just don't fit the image of battle-hardened warriors duelling to the death? Because women are the physically weaker sex? Because women can think with their brains, not just their balls?
Whatever. Which is not to say that women and sport can't be exciting (just watch Australia play New Zealand at netball) just that women playing traditionally men's games always come off second best.
But Bend it like Beckham isn't just about sport, it's about second generation immigrants juggling new culture lives with old culture parents. It's also about women and the friendships they form with other women. And the cute men who can come between them. Until girl power reasserts itself.
Bend it like Beckham is not an exciting film, nor is it a funny film, it's just a modest drama with a happy ending.
PG (Low level coarse language, sexual references)
112 minutes (1:52 hours)
Film: 14 June 2002 - Sydney Film Festival
Film: 18 June 2002 - Sydney Film Festival
Film: 4 July 2002 - Wide
DVD rental: 8 January 2003
VHS rental: 8 January 2003
DVD retail: 8 January 2003
