Bend it Like Beckham

One of our vacation viewings, wherein we discovered the blended joy of TiVO with DirecTV plus Pay Per View, resulting in a movie that you pay for once and watch at your leisure with no late fees.

I started an entry about this one some days ago but I realized I didn’t know what to say. You have to understand, I was immersed in screenwriting and film for much of my adult life and before that I was a History and Literature major. I know how to talk about movies, how to evaluate story, how to analyze text. But here’s the thing. The story of the movie? Been done. Rocky meets My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Nothing terribly subtle about the telling, either. Fairly straight-ahead. And yet. Once the story got going, I liked it. A lot. Something about the performances, in part, but that’s also directing, a kind of offhand no-need-to-underline-everything attitude, a nice interplay between the two female friends (are Dan and I the only ones who expected a kiss?) (except of course that we knew the movie had been a breakout hit with no mention of lesbian content, so we knew not to expect it for real, but boy was the subtext there). Also an unexpectedly nice build of the (hetero) romantic relationship. I actually believed the growing bond between the two, that they shared something beyond a physical attraction. I also understood for the first time the social pressures on a family that lives so completely within an ethnic enclave, that it’s not just fusty parochialism that makes parents disapprove of steps outside the known and familiar, there are repercussions. I appreciated all that. And the movie made sense to me, character sense, and it’s rare that a fluffy movie does that.

I liked it. A lot. In the end, I guess despite its unsubtle approach, the film had its own kind of subtlety.