Girls Just Wanna Play Soccer

By Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters. Posted April 4, 2003.

Gurinder Chadha is drinking tea. She's the liveliest tea drinker I've ever seen. Full of energy and ideas, she's not about to sit on a sofa in a nice hotel for an entire interview. She gets up to open a window, to check on her phone. She leans forward, then sits back. She answers the hotel phone, after wondering out loud if she should, and speaks briefly with her husband and writing partner, Paul Mayeda Berges. They're doing notes on their new movie, she explains, smiling broadly, a musical adaptation of Pride and Prejudice she describes as "Bollywood meets Fiddler on the Roof."

It's safe to say that Gurinder Chadha loves her work. Born in Kenya, she began her career as a news reporter with BBC Radio, and directed short documentaries for the BBC. In 1990, she established her own production company, Umbi Films, and made her first feature, Bhaji on the Beach, in 1993. She directed What's Cooking in 2000, about four Los Angeles families on Thanksgiving, and now, her latest project, Bend It Like Beckham, about Jess (Parminder Nagra), and Jules (Keira Knightley), young footballers aspiring to play professionally. The film was one Britain's highest grossing films in 2002.

I'm glad to see a movie that doesn't condescend to its young girl characters, send them to the prom or make them want to take off their glasses for a boy.

That was one of the things that I wanted to do with the movie, was create a movie with images of girls who were all sorts -- tall, fat, thin, small, or whatever, but all looking really powerful and confident and happy with what they were doing and therefore happy with their bodies. There was this moment when we were cutting one of the sequences where the girls were all jumping over steel barriers, and the editor was trying to do it on the beat. He said, if we do it this one way, we get Jules, but we also get this really fat girl, and her stomach goes up and down and so do her breasts, and he was worried that wouldn't look "nice" on the big screen. I said, "Are you kidding? That's the best shot!" Probably no one will notice it, but someone might somewhere, so I made active choices to put in shots like that, because they are absent from the screen, usually.

It is the ultimate kind of girl power movie, because it doesn't belittle the girls' experience. As much as I love Clueless, it's a little plasticky, even as it is about being plasticky, and it is a mainstream Hollywood movie. Given those constraints, it did pretty well. What I wanted to do was create a story about teens, but a teen movie with balls, so to speak. I wanted to make something that really looks at what you go through at that age. And it's all so complicated, dealing with boys, your girlfriends, your parents, trying to be your own person. And she's Indian, so you have all the Indian cultural stuff, and race, since she's in London.

I wanted to show that you're dealing with a lot of things at that age. But at the same time, I wanted the film to feel like a rush, because that's what you're doing then, you're rushing to stand still, because your life is kind of going in directions that you can't anticipate. And the soccer plays into that, where Jess does look amazing. And, I wanted to bring in the parents, so you could understand their points of view as well. Usually in teen movies, the parents are portrayed as silly or absent. So, from a teen movie it kind of became a family movie.

The movie makes clear that there's a generational difference in understandings of race and communities. Where the parents are somewhat fearful and divided, the girls negotiate between communities.

Absolutely. What I wanted to show with the film is give you the nuts and bolts of integration. That's what it's about, that process of being second generation or third generation Indian, very specifically in London. And no one really has done that, show how you do balance, not only culture, but also gender and sexuality. By focusing on these two characters, you get a strong picture on the constraints but also the processes that allow them to be who they are.

It's very close to my story. And I was plagued all through school with people saying, "Oh, you must be in an identity crisis," or, "There's a big culture clash going on," which just made me bristle, because we just didn't feel that. Adults don't know that, because you don't really talk about boyfriends and makeup with your mom! You know who to talk to about what, and it's a process of negotiating your different experiences and expectations of you. Though I made the film for a British audience, I think it's done so well around the world because a lot of the world lives like that too. That's the predominant experience these days. Most cities have populations who have moved from one place to another and another. And most cities don't have the kind of space that America has. Most cities have people much more on top of each other, so you have to kind of take each other's agendas on board. So you end up being a tight-knit community. And what I wanted to show was that the diasporic culture, of second and third generations, is increasingly a predominant culture.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »