Page 16 - Fujifilm Exposure_20 Bend It Like Beckham_ok

Girls on top with “Bend It Like Beckham” on location in and around West London
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W ith a title like Bend It Like Beckham you
might be forgiven for briefly thinking you’d suddenly stumbled across a superior soccer training video.
But just one look at the noisy antics of a cross-cultural gaggle of football-shirted females on a pitch near Southall suggests something quite different is bubbling up in this particular cinematic melting pot.
Keeping a close eye on proceed- ings at Yeading FC, headquarters of the film’s fictional Hounslow Harriers, is writer-director Gurinder Chadha. A BAFTA nominee for her 1994 debut feature Bhaji On The Beach, Chadha is making her first film in the UK for more than seven years.
Whisked away to Hollywood after ecstatic reviews Stateside for Bhaji – about, you may recall, an Asian ladies’ day trip to Blackpool – the irrepress- ible Chadha spent several frustrating years in “development hell.”
Her perseverance finally paid off when her script for What’s Cooking?, co-written with husband Paul Mayeda Berges, finally made it before the cameras in 2000. The warm-hearted, interweaving, tale of four ethnically diverse families living, loving, fighting and eating over the Thanksgiving hol- iday in Los Angeles was released here last summer.
“It took about four years to raise the money,” Chadha confessed. “Editorially, everybody seemed to like it but when it came to the marketing people, it was always ‘great script, but how do we sell it?”
It was only after snaring a high profile cast including Joan Chen,
Mercedes Ruehl, Alfre Woodard and Julianna Margulies that the project was finally financed with a complicat- ed mixture of bank loan, sales guaran- tee and insurance company backing.
Chadha was still trying to bring What’s Cooking? to the big screen when Bend It Like Beckham first started to be developed. The original idea came from an aspiring screen- writer Guljit Bindra whom Chadha had been mentoring.
“She was really into football and came up at first with a rather depress- ing story about a girl who doesn’t make it in professional ladies soccer. I’d been around when they had the European Championships here and was fascinated by the way the nation went berserk and how everybody got so caught up in it all.
“Football and Beckham are such seeds of the national psyche. So, we thought, wouldn’t it be great to put a girl at the centre of that frame? My friend Guljit came up with an Indian girl and I thought of Beckham,” explained Chadha.
The Indian girl in question is Jess played by newcomer Parminder Nagra and the film follows her progress from, as the hype niftily puts it, “kickabouts in the park to freekicks in the final” with her soccer aspirations set against parental oppo- sition, budding romance and a big Indian family wedding.
Though modestly budgeted, the high-profile-to-hot cast includes Keira Knightley, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Frank Harper, Juliet Stevenson, Archie Panjabi, Kulvinder Ghir and All-Saints singing star Shaznay Lewis, as the Harriers’ team captain.
As for eponymous Becks, he appears more in spirit than in the
flesh though he has given his enthusi- astic thumbs-up to the enterprise and allowed his image to be used too. The title refers to Jess’s match-winning skill, but, as the filmmakers are very anxious to point out, it is as much about “bending” society’s rules as “bending” a ball.
Chadha, born in Kenya but raised within a stone’s throw of the location, is flanked on the touchline by Japanese-American husband and co- writer, Paul, and her What’s Cooking? cinematographer, Jong Lin. Aside from his current collaboration, the amiable Taiwan-born DP is perhaps best known
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EXPOSURE • 14 & 15