Bend It Like Beckham: Trailblazers & Traitors

In my childhood home, we keep an alphabetized cabinet of old DVDs. In picking a family holiday movie to watch with growing up, I often passed over Bend It Like Beckham (2002) lingering in the early B’s. 

I made up some narrative in my head about the DVD being a gift from a family friend with misplaced kindness (“oh I saw this movie about a Punjabi girl and thought you’d love it”), so I strayed from watching it. This November, I gave it a try. 

Bend It Like Beckham follows Jesminder Bhamra (“Jess” for short), an 18-year-old Punjabi British girl with untapped athletic talent, as she navigates two worlds: the expectations of her traditional Sikh parents and the promising challenge of women’s sports.

Twenty-one years after its release, Bend It Like Beckham still feels relevant to me, and the Asian diaspora of today. The story of Jess is an often overlooked tale of what trailblazers from our community must give up to achieve their dream. 

No Longer Just A Dream

In the opening scene of the movie, prominent British soccer (I’m making the unfortunate decision to stick with American terms) commentators debate Jess’s talent as a Premier League player. Jess’s mother, a guest on the show, interrupts their discussion to voice her disapproval.

Most interpret this scene as akin to a dream sequence. It depicts Jess’s internal conflict about her future, the central problem that underpins the entire movie. 

Though viewing the scene as a figment of Jess’s imagination is valid, I believe that this scene could just as easily be a flash forward to Jess’s actual future. She becomes an iconic soccer player, and the rest of the movie tells us the story of how she got to play alongside her childhood hero, David Beckham.

In minute one of the movie, the audience sees Jess achieve her dream and play alongside Beckham. They are forced to recognize that a Punjabi girl playing alongside the soccer greats is not out of place after all. From there, the movie tackles the obstacles that Jess has to overcome to get there (including a disapproving mother and choosing between attending her sister’s wedding or her team’s tournament final).

See also: The Hundred Foot Journey: More than takeout

Many Mirrors, Many Options

Throughout the movie, the characters surrounding Jess serve as parallels for how her future could end up. With the opening scene as an admission that she will indeed become an internationally recognized soccer player, the movie becomes a journey of rejecting all possible alternatives presented to Jess. 

Her sister Pinky is on the surface at least, is the South Asian auntie’s ideal of womanhood. The community tries to force this ideal on Jess, and Pinky thereby acts as the first mirror for the protagonist. Their parents want Jess to follow in Pinky’s footsteps and consider marriage soon.

Pinky, unbeknownst to the Punjabi community, has been hooking up with her fiancee in private—something her parents certainly don’t approve of. 

Jess adopts similar tactics to Pinky. She joins an amateur women’s league but lies about it to her parents, claiming she has gotten a part-time job instead. 

She struggles to juggle the demands of both worlds, and inevitably, the Bhamra parents clue into her treacherous love of soccer.  We discover they knew about Pinky’s secret life the whole time too.

Jess reckons with her father’s unfulfilled cricket ambitions. As a young man, he was a promising player with ambition but got laughed off the English team due to his turban—and presumably his ethnic difference. He bars Jess from playing soccer to protect her from the disappointment he experienced.

Still, Jess encounters the sort of racism that drove her father away from cricket, but she fights back (a visibly different choice than her father who walked away). While she is punished with a red card for shoving a slur-spewing opposing player, Jess rejects her father’s protective instinct–and vision for her future–by continuing to play the sport she loves despite racially-driven opposition. 

Jess’s friend Jules, played by Keira Knightley, serves as another mirror for Jess. Jules’s father is indeed supportive of her choice to chase a soccer ball instead of boys, but her mother wants Jules to be more feminine. Compared to the Bhamra’s, Jules’s parents tend to be more supportive of her playing soccer as a profession.

While Jess wants to live like Jules, their families are very different. Thus, Jess’s attempts to be like her friend fall short.

With no mirrors to follow, Jess at the end of the movie stakes out her own path to become a trailblazer on the soccer field.

Navigating Uncompromising Worlds

The typical “caught between worlds” trope in diasporic media resolve through a compromise between the parties from each world. Usually, it involves getting the representatives from the “old culture” and the “new culture” to see eye to eye.

In Jess’s case, a resolution would encompass her parents (the “old culture”) letting her play soccer alongside the soccer coach and players (the “new culture”) making concessions to allow her family to be more comfortable with Jess playing. This compromise could be as simple as letting her wear sweats or tights when on the field–as showing her legs appears to be a repeatedly contentious point in the movie, especially for Jess’s mother.

However, at the end of Bend It Like Beckham, there doesn’t seem to be any form of compromise. Jess makes her parents come to terms with her desire to play soccer, and she forces them to accept that she will play soccer with or without their approval. 

The Bhamra’s recognize that Jess will play soccer regardless and will no longer be happy without it, so her father lets her leave Pinky’s wedding to attend the final match in the tournament. For the family that has placed so much emphasis on family and this wedding, such an action seems unthinkable, but Jess’s lack of happiness when she is not playing soccer ruins the event for her father, who ultimately lets her go.

Her family disapproved at many points along the way: at her purchase of cleats, at her relationship with the coach Joe, and at her wish to attend school in America. In the end, Jess gets all those things, but the soccer world does nothing to adapt to her presence as a Brown woman in an exclusionary sport. In a sense, Jess has to always put her family second to achieve her ambition. 

The best symbol is the giant poster of David Beckham in Jess’s room. Whereas Jess’s family hangs a portrait of Guru Nanak, a central figure of Sikhism, in their living room to represent their ties to their heritage, Jess prays to the poster of Beckham as if he is a divine figure. Her room lacks any other notable Sikh or Punjabi influences and is instead full of soccer memorabilia, indicating how she has to make her ambition a religious practice to even have a hope of attaining it. 

In this light, the movie has the unpleasant moral that in order to break into exclusionary spaces as a diasporic star, one must cast aside their “old culture” to a degree. 

See also: Harold and Kumar: Using stereotypes to fight stereotypes

Behind the Lights: A Valid Moral?

In Bend It Like Beckham, the path to stardom for Asian women in the diaspora is sour and difficult–but still possible. However, that downbeat vision is not as true to reality as the movie would make it seem.

Luckily, in 2023, we have more Asian diaspora stars in general and more of their stories to examine. Without doing a comprehensive dive, it seems that talent does not necessarily correlate to success even when afforded an opportunity. 

For one, Parminder Nagra, the actress who played Jess, had one of the best performances of the cast of this movie. Yet, given her rise to prominence through this film, her career has not gone on to include the blockbuster appearances that her co-stars Keira Knightley and Jonathan Rhys Meyers racked up.

Notably, even Ke Huy Quan, winner of an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, struggled to find acting success and even gave up on the profession for a while. He was backed by one of the most prominent figures in the space in Steven Spielberg, and decades later, only when surrounded by folks with similar experiences to him, Quan received recognition. His life story embodies a different and more laborious path than the one that Bend It Like Beckham played out. 

Bend It Like Beckham tells us that success comes at a costlier price for those of us in the Asian diaspora. That being said, even if somewhat depressing, for a movie that is over twenty years old to retain a glimmer of what our path to stardom entails remains impressive.

See also: Disney releases first original movie with an Indian American lead, Spin