Bend it Like Beckham
While everything in the core of my being seemed to suggest I’d perish before seeing this one through, I was shocked to find how hard it was to take my eyes off the screen. Going by something Keira Knightley said on last week’s “Friday Night With Jonathan Ross”, it seems people at the time pulled her aside as the sole true failing of the film. Well, I kinda-sorta hate Keira Knightley almost as much as Mark Kermode (who laments on an almost weekly basis on his podcast that he didn’t come up with the play on her name of Ikea Knightley); but here, while her performance isn’t any better, I can say for certain that she looks more beautiful than she has in any of the costume-and-make-up laden productions which have followed; and that “school prefect, teeth, teeth,” thing actually works better here than it does anywhere else too. In short, I thought she was pretty darn fantastic.
But while we’re talking about the acting, I have to say I couldn’t find a single truly decent performance here. On the Indian side, things are uniformly over the top as a sitcom sketch (okay, granted I don’t know the culture, but I’d like to think I’m not offending by expecting a slightly broader scale of eccentricity); on the Brit side as deep as a CBBC show. The movie as a whole, likewise, is very TV-ish. And since I’m mentioning the failings, of course let’s not forget, this is a movie about football which begins with some very dodgy visual effects grafting its star into some Beckham footage, followed by a ghastly moment which proves why sports presenters like Gary Lineker etc don’t act a lot.
But like I said, I found it insanely watchable. It doesn’t surprise me that it was one of the more successful British films at the international box office. Its badness is pretty consistent, and it’s that kind of badness you can easily settle into (that or it genuinely does tone itself down towards the end, I’m not sure) and, once settled into, everything else the film makers are trying to do works. I think more than anything it shows just how far a good screenplay can go.