10/12/2002 - Footballl as a metaphor for the evolution of multi-ethnic integration. Gurinder Chadha presents Bend it Like Beckham to Italy and explains the reasons for its huge success

With a UK box office take of over Euros 18 million and worldwide success, Bend it Like Beckham is Gurinder Chadha's third feature film. Born and bred in England to an Indian family, Chadha's film is the story of Jess, a girl who shares the director's ethnic heritage, and her best friend, an English girl called Jules. Both teens are huge fans of David Beckham and dream of becoming professional soccer players.
Not surprisingly, their families don’t agree. But in the best tradition, the girls overcome all the obstacles their well-meaning parents put in their way and make the dream come true.

This film is about a girl’s passion for soccer, but it goes beyond that...
“Indeed. Soccer is a metaphor, a way of emphasising the racial identity issue and the conflictual relationship between parents and children. It is also about the role of women, and not just in Indian society. And I think it worked. I followed the film’s promotional campaign and travelled the world, Australia, Canada and even Japan, and realised that when it comes down to it, this film covers universal themes, not in the least attributable to any single culture. Even though this is the story of one Indian woman’s life, and contains numerous autobiographical elements, that did not prevent such a wide-ranging audience from identifying with her.”

A bit like East is East by Damien O’Donnell?
“Let’s say that Bend it Like Beckham is an evolution. Damien’s film was about the Indian community in England in the seventies, in the last century, when relations between parents and children were very different from today. My film is about a community rooted in the 21st century, when so many things have changed: families are more closely integrated in Anglo-Saxon society and parents make a greater effort to understand their offspring and their ambitions, trying to help them.”

Your film features a number of your family members, especially the women, and they appear to take all the decisions.
“No. It really is like that. The mother is the protagonist and she is very similar to my mother, and all Indian mothers for that matter. They say strange and sometimes absurd things and are almost always extreme. Let’s just say that they make a lot of noise, but the final decisions are always taken by the men folk. The fathers. My experience with my aunts, for example, was bizarre to say the least: especially in the engagement and marriage scenes, where I found myself being told off by my mother because I failed to include one of my aunts in the shot. And to think that she’d worn a special sari for the occasion!”

Earlier on you spoke of the new century, and emphasised the fact that there now is greater integration between people of different ethnicities. Do you think people from different backgrounds and cultures will really ever be able to live together in harmony?
“To answer that question I will refer to my film. When it was presented in England, none of the reviews or articles published in the most popular daily newspapers mentioned the fact that the protagonists were Indian, or that this was an Indian story. I believe that that was a very important signal. Having said that, I don’t think that in England, or elsewhere for that matter, the problems of racial integration have been sorted out. For example, I know that Muslim women in Pakistani families are experiencing very difficult times right now. However huge steps towards more mutual understanding between people of different ethnic groups have been taken.
After all, whatever their social, racial or religious identity may be, parents will always try to give their children the very best.”