MODEST
GOALS
by Howard Schumann
In the warm and appealing comedy Bend It Like Beckham,
traditional Sikh family values clash with the aspirations of a headstrong
18-year old girl named Jess (Parminder K. Nagra), who wants to play
professional soccer. Her hero is David Beckham, England's top professional
soccer player. "Anyone can cook aloo gobi," she complains, "but who
can bend a ball like Beckham?"
Jess's
parents want her to follow in the footsteps of her older sister Pinkie
(Archie Panjabi) and marry a neighborhood Indian boy. Jess would rather
sneak off to the park to practice soccer with a group of neighborhood
boys. When her friend Jules, played by Julia Roberts look-alike Keira
Knightley, asks her to try out for an all-girl soccer team, her mother
strongly objects and tells Jess that it is not feminine for a girl to
be playing football. Jess' father (Anupam Kher) is more sympathetic,
however, but remembers the racism that stopped him from playing cricket
and wants to prevent his daughter from experiencing a similar rejection.
Jess
and Jules become friends, but their relationship is complicated when
both develop a love interest in Joe, the handsome young coach (Jonathan
Rhys-Meyers). Jess is aware that her talents are sufficiently strong
to win a scholarship to an American college, and she must ultimately
choose between her ambitions and honoring her parent's desires.
Like
Jess, director Gurinder Chadha grew up in London's Southall neighborhood
in a Sikh Punjabi family, and the film's themes of racism, gender discrimination,
and cultural identity reflect her own personal experience. Bend It Like
Beckham took in more than $25.7 million at box offices in the U.K.,
the most ever for a British-made and, as a result of the film's success,
women all over Britain began signing up in large numbers for amateur
soccer teams.
I
wanted to like Bend It Like Beckham because of its message about
transcending limitations, and because I love soccer. Unfortunately,
we never really get a sense of the strategy, thinking, passing, and
teamwork that is the heart of the game. All we see are dizzying close-ups
of the girls running and scoring goal shots and the constant display
of the players' legs, chests, and behinds. Apparently the director would
rather pump up the energy with sexual suggestiveness, ear-splitting
music, and last minute heroics than help us to truly understand the
game.
Nagra
is outstanding as the conflicted heroine, and Rhys-Myers is impressive
as the coach who had his own career cut short by a knee injury, but
the love interest has little depth or chemistry. Though the film "celebrates
the process of cultural change," it doesn't grapple with the real pain
of discrimination and rejection. While it may leave you with a warm,
fuzzy feeling, Bend It Like Beckham is so formulaic that it ends
up as just another slick commercial package whose final kick falls far
short of the goalpost.
Flower
& Garnet, the first feature-length film by Canadian director
Keith Behrman, is the story of a broken family that is forced to confront
problems that have gone on for too many years. The film shows the effect
of a father's unexpressed grief on his eight-year old son, Garnet (Colin
Roberts), whose mother died giving him birth. Set in the rural Cache
Creek area in British Columbia, it is a subtle and deeply moving portrait
of a family that lives in an emotional no-man's land.
The
father, Ed (Callum Keith Rennie), is uncommunicative with both his family
and his lady friend Barb (Kristen Thomson). Constantly downing cans
of beer, he only relates to his son with silence, self-hatred, and sudden
explosions of violence. He tries to school him in typical macho activities,
taking him fishing, driving, and shooting on an improvised pistol range,
but is unable to provide any real love or understanding. The years have
turned the boy into a sullen withdrawn child, with his only nurturing
coming from his beautiful sister Flower (Jane McGregor).
Roberts is so natural as the young Garnet that it seems
as if you can hear his thoughts and feel his feelings above the long,
awkward silences. The film's climax comes as a devastating, unexpected
jolt.
In
Manon Briand's warm and humorous Quebecois film, Chaos and Desire,
Alice Bradley, played by the lovely Pascale Bussieres, is a seismologist
working in Japan studying the factors that can predict earthquakes.
When the tides mysteriously stop flowing on the St. Lawrence River in
her hometown of Baie Comeau, she returns to investigate and comes up
against the bizarre behavior of local residents. In one instance, a
little Chinese girl (Ji-Yan Séguin) sleepwalks every night at the exact
same time. In others, a woman chops down every tree in her front yard,
and the phone number of a fire-fighting pilot named Marc Vandal (Jean-Nicolas
Verreault) has been ripped out of every phone book in town.
Running
from a troubled past and consumed by loneliness, Alice must now deal
not only with the problem of the tides but with a growing involvement
with Vandal and the not so subtle advances of her journalist friend
Catherine (Julie Gayet). When Alice uncovers the film's central mystery,
the investigation turns away from science to the world of spirit, achieving
a resolution of surprising power.
©2003 Howard Schumann
CineScene
