Bhaji on the field: Beckham is winning, but unoriginal

Gurinder Chadha, director of Bend It Like Beckham (a box office splash whose ripples were so huge they were visible on this side of the Atlantic), once expressed worry that patrons uncouth enough to call football "soccer" wouldn't be able to identify with a movie that dealt with such an eminently British form of hero worship.

Patent redcoat snobbery aside, Chadha had a point: David Beckham is something like a six-weeks-post-Titanic Leo-for-all-demographics in his homeland, a secular saint on the most internationally recognizable sporting group today (Manchester United, stupid American), and to market a movie like Bend It Like Beckham (without including the word "wedding" in its title, no less) to an audience that knows this deity only as Posh Spice's Significant Other is risqué—right?

Except not. Because when it comes right down to it, the British don't exactly have a monopoly on sports clichés or "ethnic" comedies. And because Bend it Like Beckham is extremely loveable—light-hearted and sympathetic and tons of fun. More to the point, Americans invented the sort of political correctness that infuses Chadha's movie, and we have no trouble embracing the entirety of the film, feminism, multiculturalism, homosexuality and all.

And this PC-ness is the crux of the film. Jasminder Bhamra (an adorable Parminder Nagra, whose sheer joie de vivre keeps the movie afloat) is your average good Indian girl—conservative in dress, university-bound, polite to her elders. Sure, she's a little eccentric—witness "that bald man" who lives on her walls and smiles, Buddha-like, at the teen—but nothing a few cooking lessons and some aloo-gobi won't solve.

But when "Jess" steps up her obsession with football from goofing off in the park near her Hounslow house (en route to grocery shopping) to playing, uniformed, for an all-girls team at the behest of her new friend Jules (Keira Knightley, most recently seen opposite Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean), her parents are distraught. She's committing the dangerous triple sin of showing her scarred legs, making it impossible for her mother (Shaheen Khan) and father (Anupam Kher, a Bollywood veteran who's starred in over 500 Hindi films) to find her a husband and lying, repeatedly, to her parents. Jules and Jess tackle homophobia, love (surging hormones?), misunderstandings galore (most of which involve Jess' innocent embraces—Chadha could have cut an hour out of her film if someone had just told Jess not to be so darned affectionate) and the Big Game on their way to gaining acceptance from their respective families.

Some Big Brother-esque movie guru (the same one who insisted that reality shows were trendy and that any two cops paired in an action flick have to be polar opposites) must have decided that every immigrant family must have a healthy dose of quirky panache and has therefore consigned every "ethnic" comedy (as opposed to all those comedies where characters have no ethnicity, you see) to be a feel-good study in how easily traditionalism gives way to assimilation. So now, in addition to the boy-meets-girl-falls-in-love-does-something-dumb-almost-break-up-relationship-is-saved formula that applies to romantic comedies and the spend-$10-million-on-stuff-to-blow-up formula for action flicks, we have a slightly more complex formula that insists on binding immigrant parents who reform and therefore discard their values, girls stifled by [insert "exotic" culture here], no fewer than two PC topics and, of course, a wedding into a slightly cohesive whole.

Beckham is no exception—it approaches its subject matter in a disconcertingly anthropological fashion and seems to genuflect to the ethnic comedy format by saying at every turn, "Look, isn't that strange? But that's how they live! Don't worry, though, they'll give in to the 'right' way of doing things by the end of it all." When Chadha did it with Bhaji on the Beach, it was at least original. Not in the wake of daring movies such as Monsoon Wedding, which had the heroine embracing, not renouncing, her culture through an arranged marriage. And Chadha's taken pains to sanitize this film, to caricaturize the Bhamras to the point where they have neither flaws (the film completely brushes over an incident in which Jess points out that her parents would be unlikely to let her marry a white boy, furious if she wanted a black boy, and apoplectic if she asked them about a Muslim boy) nor virtues, just idiosyncrasies and outdated beliefs.

For all its girl power riffs, Bend it Like Beckham is surprisingly chauvinist. It's not competition for the same soccer scholarship or cultural differences that come between Jess and Jules; it's their studly coach, Joe (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), whose perpetually sullen good looks have both girls secretly enraptured and whose drunken kiss with Jess breaks them up for a full 17 minutes. Because, of course, what on earth could possibly get two female soccer stars' competitive juices flowing like a tousle-headed Irish boy?

Then there's the supporting female characters: Almost as though to make up for the loveability of our heroines, we're treated to a vaguely manic Juliet Stevenson as Jules' absolutely clueless mother, whose chief concern in life is her daughter's lack of fascination with the WonderBra; a Pinky Bhamra (Archie Punjabi) straight out of Clueless as Jess' shopping-and-sex-obsessed older sister; and Jess' mother, whose views a "full Indian dinner" as the pinnacle of her existence. Jules' and Jess' respective fathers are, naturally, ultimately uber-supportive of their girls, since, you know, when it comes to being shallow and bigoted, women clearly have a monopoly.

That's not to say Beckham isn't fun. It is. It's the ultimate feel-good movie—unless you stick pins in small furry animals on weekends, you won't be able to leave this movie without smiling. It's beautiful and uplifting and yes, having athletic girls jump around to peppy pop strains does help the mood. The acting is superlative, with Jess and Jules leading an incredibly unforced cast (Rhys-Meyers holds his own, and Frank Harper as Jules' sympathetic father is winning as a gentle husband bewildered by his high-strung wife) through the paces their script insists on; the film gets laughs when it wants them and sympathetic sighs when it needs them.

So go into the theater armed with skepticism toward what the film is preaching, but go in, anyways, because you will enjoy this movie for what it's worth—an unhealthy concoction where Karate Kid meets Saved by the Bell meets My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding meets a sterile Mississippi Masala, milked for all its worth and spun out with all the styled fusion of the crème liquor-laced "round round chappatis" I'm sure the Bhamras will serve at Jess' wedding to Joe. Whether all you need is a little reminder that sometimes you gotta kick tradition to reach your goal (pun oh-so-intended) or your favorite goldfish just died, Bend It Like Beckham is the absolute most perfect antidote to your blues, as long as you don't insist on reading too deeply into its moralizing.