Jess' love of soccer and refusal to quit playing causes a rift in her family. Jess' sister is engaged to be married into a very traditional family who looks down on Jess' activities, and Jess's mother wants her to be much more traditional. Her parents regard
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religion as extremely important and place a very strong emphasis on her education. Jess' parents are opposed to her playing soccer. Her mother wants her to grow into a nice,
traditional Sikh girl who can cook a full Punjabi dinner. Jess’ father used to played cricket, but he got rejected from the sport because back in his days racism was very active, and now her father is being very protective of his daughter because he does not want her to get hurt. Jess is torn between two worlds, the tension between what she wants and what others want for her. She wants to please her family, but pleasing means cheating herself. She is torn between following her dreams and obeying her cultural traditions. Jess’ decides to follow her dream while trying to respect her culture.
While Jess is involved in soccer without her parent's knowledge, she also learns to cook a Punjabi dinner along with preparing for her sister's wedding. The point of this movie is that Jess does not take no for an answer. She pushes herself to accomplish her goals, while trying not to displease her parents’. Overall, the movie did a good job of showing the conflict Jess had with her parents, and in the end she succeeded
in persuading them that they are living in a multi-modern world, a world where she can still preserve her culture while going after her dreams and aspirations. Based on Jess’s conflicts the viewer is able to enjoy and learn how she resolved these conflicts. In the book, Shared Differences,, Diane Carson explained that in a multicultural world with growing diversity, people need to find "strategies for sharing, understanding, and enjoying" multiplicities and differences (Carson and Lester 54). This suggests that we must seek a common ground to articulate what unites as well as divides us, and come to appreciate our commonalties as well as our differences. Jess’ life story represents
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multiculturalism and her willingness to find her identity and preserve her traditional cultural history. In the past, there was pressure on immigrant communities to let go of their past and assimilate. In her book, Defusing cultural boundaries on the New Global Frontier, Nina Krebs introduced an emphasis on multiculturalism, that those descendants of families who worked so hard to “dissolve their roots in order to assimilate” are now digging for any artifacts or photos to reclaim the roots of their family history (Krebs 17). While Jess’ parents have no desire to assimilate, they fail to understand the new opportunities available to their daughter. And they see English culture as a threat to the family. This exemplified how people treasure their uniqueness, which, for many, evolves from ethnic, cultural or spiritual history. Lisa Lowe included a misrepresentation of cultural history made by narratives of multiculturalism, “which do not make these connections between historically differentiated forms of disempowerment or which do not make space for oppositional critiques risk denuding racial and ethic groups of their specificity”(Lowe 537). She stresses the importance of our cultural history as part of multiculturalism. There are many representations of multiculturalism, but being able to embrace one’s cultural history is one of the most distinguished.
Chadha does a good job drawing how these problems "are not just an Indian thing" as Jules says. Jules' mother is similarly against her daughter playing football, and stereotyped that Jules must be a lesbian since she favors sports bras, has short hair and wears boyish clothes. Jules’ mother wants her to be more cultural, she asked Jess to teach Jules a thing or two about her Sikh culture. Jules met Jess at the perfect time, a time when Jess’ family is getting ready for her sister’s wedding. Much of the cultures and traditions
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are shown in the stages leading to the wedding and the actual wedding itself. Because they instantly became close friends, Jules had no problem in learning about Jess’ culture.
Bend it Like Beckham stresses the importance of friendship and diversity. Both Jules and Jess are from two different worlds, yet they are able to come together and shared their differences and achieved their dreams. This is an example of how multiculturalism had made an impact on one’s lives and touches them personally. It showed Jules’ willingness to appreciate and respect Jess’ culture and she is committed to learn about it. The implication of multiculturalism is the willingness to engage and embrace the concept of otherness. Media representations in the multicultural context also encouraged the study of concepts of nation and nationhood (Fiske 71). This means that the public can learn about multicultural representations through the media, which shows the importance of diversity from parts of the world that are distant from them, either geographically or culturally. It can also mean that multiculturalism is intending to bring people together to recognize, analyze and contribute to what has been called 'unity in diversity' (Carson and Lester 23).
The film gives a glimpse of a London we rarely seen in the movies. Beckham excels in giving the audience a glimpse into the tradition of this ancient culture. The culture in this case is that of an immigrant and first-generation Silk Indians living in Great Britain. The film is full of Indian culture, including saris, salwar kameez, samosas, Bollywood musicals, singing game shows, and bhangra rock. The unbelievably colorful,
extravagant wedding was one of the highlights of the film. The film captured the energetic football games and the sizzling German nightclub. The movie includes common
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phrases in Punjabi that are used in the family's everyday life. Several examples of these phrases are "Hai Raba!”(Oh My God), "chi, chi, chi"(bad, bad, bad), and many more. Bend It Like Beckham makes it known that the first generation Indian immigrants had
moved up in the class system. This can be seen in one part of the movie when it showed the suburb Indian neighborhood as one of the nicer towns of Britain. Because each of these families works hard in valuing education and successes, the parents expect their sons and daughters to be important businessmen, doctors, or lawyers. The movie also shows the viewers how tradition and religion still survive in our modern world. How cultures once separated by miles, now live in the house next door. There is a scene in the film of Jess's family having a celebration. It's loud and boisterous and over the next yard there's a regular British lady hanging up laundry. In addition, the movie conveys many of the important values that the parents, as Sikhs and Indians, wanted to implant in their daughter’s head. It is evident that in the traditional Indian culture, women were viewed on a different level than men. When Jess finished telling her parents about joining the girls' soccer team, her father told her that she should start behaving like a proper woman. Being a "proper woman" often indicates possessing the knowledge of cooking, not spending unnecessary time outside the house, and many more feminine stereotype-occupations and skills. It was important that Jess and her sister learn to respect their elders and know how to cook traditional meals. If you look at any culture you will find regular people who do some pretty funny things and Beckham showcases the Indian culture with love and affection.
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In general Bended It Like Beckham embraces all the spectrum of the day-to-day traumas and triumphs we all encountered or experiencing in the modern multicultural world. The film celebrates the processes of cultural change, the experience of living in a diverse environment from one generation to another and not only the difficulties involved
but also the pleasure in becoming more integrated. This is much more than a soccer movie, it's also about is about coming of age, about girls in sports, about traditional family values and customs. This movie is not made to attack or recognize one culture or the other. The point was to show that there are differences, but a person can transcend the differences as was done by Jess and Jules.
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Works Cited
Bend It Like Beckham. Dir. Chadka, Gurinder. DVD. Twentieth Century
Fox Film Corporation, 2002.
Stygall, Gail. “Imaging Los Angeles in the Production of Multiculturalism”. Academic
Discourse: Readings for Argument and Analysis. 3rd ed. Ohio: Thompson Custom
Publishing, 2003.
Carson, Diane, and Lester D. Friedman. Shared Differences. Multicultural Media &
Practical Pedagogy. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 1995.
Fiske, John. Media Matters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1994.
Krebs, Nina. Edgewalkers: Defusing cultural boundaries on the New Global Frontier.
NJ: New Horizon Press. 1999.
Long, Robert. Multiculturalism. New York: the H. W. Wilson Company. 1997
