/ARTS WEEKLY/INDIA: Film Bends It for the Box Office

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Aug 6 2002 (IPS) - If the British blockbuster ‘Bend it Like Beckham’ is also running to packed houses in India, no one is surprised. It has all the romantic ingredients of a standard, crowd-pulling ‘Mumbai Masala’ production that makes the Indian cinema industry the world’s biggest, though not the best.

Take for instance the mandatory wedding scene that is the climax of the film climaxes. It is replete with drummers, mare for the groom and weepy aunts and provides just the excuse to bring on a Bhangra number, a vigorous Punjabi dance that has acquired fresh fervour thanks to British practitioners – in this case the famous ‘B21’ group.

The film even borrowed a Bollywood (Indian counterpart of Hollywood) regular, Anupam Kher, to play the role of Mr Bharma, a British Sikh father in the unenviable position of having to ensure that his teenaged daughters do not stray from the fold.

And it does not take too much intelligence to see that a film released around the time when the World Cup fever as its peak would benefit greatly from having the magic word Beckham to its title, whether shown in Britain or India.

As with director Gurinder Chaddha’s best known production ‘Bhaji on the Beach’, the film revolves around the pangs of a teenaged Indian (in fact South Asian) girls torn between duty to middle-classy first-generation immigrant parents and the ‘normal’ desire of a young Britishers, of whatever shade of skin, to experiment with life and love.

Jess Bharma (played by Parminder Nagra) wants nothing more in life than to be allowed to worship her football hero and see how best she can emulate the Manchester United professional’s trademark kick at the local park.

Trouble is Jess’ parents want their 18-year-old to get serious about her life and career and follow in the footsteps of her more conventional elder sister Pinky, who is in that most significant state – engaged to be married to a suitable boy.

Mrs Bharma (Shaheen Khan)’s wail that at Jess’ age she was married and making ‘alu-gobi’ (spiced potato and cauliflower) defines acceptable limits for a good Sikh girl.

But Jess has more than making the perfect ‘chappati’ (unleavened bread) or swotting to become a solicitor on her mind.

Peace in the Houslow household is guaranteed to be shattered when she secretly signs up with a local girls’ football team coached by the macho Joe (Jonathan Rhy-Meyers).

Her partner in rebellion is the tomboyish Jules (Keira Knightley), whose mother (Juliet Stevenson) worries that her daughter is developing bigger biceps than some of her boyfriends and is convinced that the friendship is lesbian.

But both girls end up falling for Joe and falling out with each other, delightfully complicating the plot and somehow anchoring it in reality.

The story of Jess is much more than that of a South Asian girl caught between two cultures or of soccer madness, though the on-field sequences are remarkable. It is also about female bonding and racial relations in contemporary Britain.

Other films of this genre, such as ‘Billy Elliot’ and ‘The Full Monty’, have examined soci-cultural problems in Britain rather well — but none have had done it as delightfully as ‘Bend it Like Beckham’

Above all, as Chaddha herself explains, football in the film becomes “a metaphor for girls wanting to hold their own and excel in a man’s world”.

Chaddha, whose films seem to specialise in bringing out universal social frailities through the particular, also manages to resoundingly deliver the message that no race, culture or gender has a monopoly on family oppression of the adolescent or young adult. She rips apart English snobbery as easily as oppression within Asian families.

Speaking to newspersons on a promotional trip to India last week, Chaddha said it felt “fantastic that trade papers across the world where the film has opened continue to show that yet another million had been notched up”.

According to Hollywood-based co-producer of ‘Bend It Like Beckham’, Deepak Nayar, the film had already grossed over 11 million dollars in Britain, 6 million in Australia close to one million dollars in Singapore and is doing very well in South Africa.

All that success could mean nothing more than the fact that Chaddha has stumbled on to what Bollywood has discovered some time ago — that there is large market out there for films dealing with the experience a prosperous and increasingly influential diaspora in these countries.

Of late, Bollywood itself has been concentrating on non-resident Indian themes and several films have grossed more dollars abroad than in the home country. A typical example is ‘Pardes’ (abroad), which is the story of a successful Indian businessman settled in the United States who is seeking a bride for his son from the home country – but fails to do so.

Another Bollywood blockbuster, ‘Dilwale Dulhaniyan Le Jayenge” (Braveheart Gets The Bride) has a plot in which an Indian shopkeeper father brings his daughter to India to be married off to his friend’s son but finally surrenders her to her London-raised lover who follows the family to Punjab.

“We are told it (‘Bend it Like Beckham’) is the most successful British-financed, independent film with multi-cultural interests,” Chaddha, who began her career with BBC Radio and cut her teeth on the British Film Institute- funded documentary ‘I’m British But…’.

To be fair to Chaddha, the film stands on its own. A measure of the stir the film has created in Britain is the note and bottle of wine she received from Prime Minister Tony Blair telling her how much he enjoyed the film.