I Love 'Bend It Like Beckham'

Well, I finally got around to seeing the British movie Bend It Like Beckham at my local theater today. It's one of the most intriguing films I've seen recently, mainly because it deals with two subjects most Americans can't be bothered with - interracial relationships and soccer!

Bend It Like Beckham - the title refers to British soccer star David Beckham and his ability to deflect a ball - is a warm, enjoyable tale of Jess, an English girl of Indian descent with a passion for playing soccer. She has to deal with her conservative immigrant parents who wish to marry her to a respectable Indian boy and look down on her athletic aspirations, because sport is something nice girls just don't get involved in. Jess makes friends with a girl who helps her get on a soccer team, where Jess gets emotionally involved with her white male coach. It's ostensibly a feminist sports movie, but it's even more about how different cultures clash, how Third World immigrant children try to assimilate into Western society and maintain cultural ties to their families, and how young people of different races and ethnicities discover how they have more in common with each other (through, in this case, sport) than what divides them.

The movie has some flaws in its storyline - it includes a subplot based on a misunderstanding that could have come out of a Three's Company episode - but my gut reaction was mainly positive. What's encouraging about Bend It Like Beckham is the astonishing success it's enjoyed here in America, and not just because it's helping to popularize soccer. In America, ethnic assimilation and integration currently take a back seat to the idea of celebrating differences in the name of "diversity," which only serves to balkanize us even further. The movie shows how people of different races and cultures in Great Britain live in a far more liberally integrated society than Americans do. (In Essex County, New Jersey, where I live, you have cities like Newark and East Orange which are overwhelmingly black and/or Hispanic and suburban towns like Verona and Cedar Grove which are overwhelmingly white and Asian; most of the few racially integrated towns in Essex are segregated along neighborhood lines, though towns such as Maplewood and South Orange are more thoroughly integrated.) Bend It Like Beckham shows a more attractive alternative to the racial and ethnic balkanization that permeates much of America today; its success allows us Americans to envision a future in which we embrace brotherhood. . .and sisterhood.

Sadly, though, it probably won't do much for American soccer.

(P.S. Ironically, I saw this film right after Manchester United, Beckham's former team, finished its exhibition game tour of the United States. Though well attended, the games were more of a novelty than a way to support soccer in the U.S. The only way to do that is to get behind the teams in the American major leagues - and to keep an eye on the National Football League, which doesn't like the competition!)