Bend It Like Beckham

Gurinder Chadha wants the pleasure of a sports comedy without treating a girl’s family as an obstacle to be cleared and forgotten. That is a sound reason to make Bend It Like Beckham, and the film is funny and affectionate enough to survive its predictable course. Jess wants to play football; the people whose approval matters to her want something else. The film takes her ambition and their concern seriously, even when its jokes get broad.

Parminder Nagra is the reason that conflict matters. Her performance makes Jess’s frustration understandable without turning every family disagreement into a demand that we applaud her. We felt protective of Jess when her wish to play football met parental disapproval: Parminder Nagra makes it feel like a reasonable request she should not have to defend. There is enough affection in the performance, too, to explain why walking away from the family would not solve much. That keeps the comedy from becoming smug.

Keira Knightley gives Jules the energy to keep the younger characters from being swallowed by the family comedy. The pleasure of the leads is how readily we accept their enthusiasm; the film does not have to keep telling us that football matters. Anupam Kher and Shaheen Khan, as Mr. Bhamra and Mrs. Bhamra, help keep the parents worth listening to, even when the writing pushes them towards caricature. We would have welcomed more of that patience across the supporting cast.

Jong Lin’s cinematography suits the cheerful mood, although we find the images less persuasive when the family tensions need some weight. Nick Ellis’s production design is most useful in making the domestic setting feel like somewhere Jess belongs, which helps explain her reluctance to disappoint anyone. We rarely find our attention drifting from the performers to their surroundings. That seems a sensible balance for this comedy, though it leaves the writing exposed whenever a joke is too obvious.

Justin Krish’s editing does more to give the football its force. The movement has a briskness that makes the game enjoyable even if the sporting outcome is not what brought us here, and those passages are more alert than some of the comic exchanges. Craig Pruess’s music helps sustain the buoyancy, although we occasionally wanted the film to stop helping us enjoy ourselves quite so diligently. When the performances have already won us over, another nudge towards cheerfulness adds little.

The screenplay by Gurinder Chadha, Paul Mayeda Berges and Guljit Bindra leans too often on the stock reactions of family comedy. We can sometimes see the joke arriving before the character has finished making it possible. The romance also feels more dutiful than the football, adding familiar business to a story that already has enough to occupy Jess. There are smart lines, but the writing repeatedly softens the discomfort it raises, leaving the family conflict tidier than the performances suggest it ought to be.

We would choose this for an evening when a familiar sports story sounds like a pleasure rather than a warning. It is less suitable if the family disagreements are what interest us most, because the script tends to retreat just as they become difficult. There is room in the genre for more awkwardness than Gurinder Chadha allows here. We recommend it when the company wants something cheerful and nobody minds knowing roughly where it is going.