Coming-of-age meets the assimilation blues in the British sports comedy hit Bend It Like Beckham. 

Jessminder Bhamra (Parminder Nagra) is a young British girl in a family of very traditional Indian immigrants.  While her female contemporaries have largely assimilated into British culture, they've done so in an 'acceptable' way, a giggling girlish way.  But Jess is obsessed by soccer.  Her room is a shrine to soccer star David Beckham, and she plays soccer in the park with the boys rather than learning how to cook. 

One day Jess's park soccer moves are witnessed by another soccer fiend, Juliette 'Jules' Paxton (Keira Knightley), who invites Jess to try out for the girls soccer team she plays with, the Hounslow Harriers.   Jess tries out and is accepted on the team.  Key element:  she hasn't told her parents.  She didn't ask their permission because she knew they'd say no.

So Jess is 'sneaking around behind her parents' back', a typical teen pursuit, but she's not doing it to meet unapproved boys, she's doing it to play soccer.  While Jess is the focus of the movie, Jules has parent troubles of her own and also has a mother who tries to make her more 'girly'.

Bend It Like Beckham is directed and co-written by Gurinder Chadha, who naturally has a good feel for the Indian portion of the story.  But the Jules family scenes feel authentic as well, taking into consideration the demands of comedy. 

Complicating the Jess and Jules storyline as best friends united by a passion for soccer is the fact that both girls are attracted to the team's coach Joe (Jonathan Rhys Meyers).  And complicating the soccer storyline is the fact that the big finals soccer match falls on the same day as Jess' sister's wedding.  The traditional Indian wedding means we get a lot of exotic color. 

I've recently viewed (and reviewed) My Big Fat Greek Wedding and the two movies make an interesting compare-and-contrast.  Both deal with the children of immigrants both breaking away from and in some ways accepting the cultures they came from, both stories originated from children of immigrants mining their own histories for material.  While both are billed as comedies, I found Wedding to be more comedic, and Beckham to be more skewed to drama than comedy, though there is certainly comedy present as well.   Both are 'feel-good' movies, with the families at first resisting and then accepting their children's differences with the culture they were raised in. 

I did have some questions about Bend It Like Beckham, which might be just because I'm a Yank. 

One question involves soccer - we learn in the movie that Mr Bhamra, Jess' father (Anupam Kher) was a soccer player who wasn't allowed into the soccer clubs when he came to England.  And when Jess joined the Harriers, she was the only Indian.  Aren't there Indian clubs?  I'd think there'd be bound to be, as popular as soccer is.  My suspicion is that the writers wanted to tell a story about interactions between the Indian and British cultures, rather than an all-Indian girls-not-allowed story.  

And speaking of the interactions of cultures, just as a news observer, I'd been under the impression that there was a lot more racial prejudice in Britain than is shown here, where one racial slur is the extent of it.  As shown in Beckham, the only resistance Jess encounters is with her parents and the more conservative members of her own culture, and with the one exception mentioned above, the wider culture is entirely accepting of her ambitions.  Maybe that's accurate, I certainly couldn't say, but it took me by surprise.

But still - an engaging, often humorous, often heart-tugging story with characters you'll be rooting for.  And I'm living proof that this movie can be enjoyed by someone who doesn't know doodly-squat about soccer.

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