7. The Football Team's Progress - Bend It Like Beckham
The Plot: Jess (Parminder Nagra) is a teenage football prodigy who loves David Beckham. Her traditional Sikh family disapprove of this, and over the course of the film, Jess has to hide playing football from her family. It's an engaging conflict, but it wears thinner every time her parents find out about the football. They tell her she has to give it up, and after a while, we realise that she won't: the ultimatums come to mean nothing. In the end, her dad accepts her choices, and lets her move to America pursue the game professionally. The Subplot: Jess has to help her team, Hounslow Harriers win the league, despite falling for her coach Joe (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), and upsetting her best friend Jules (Keira Knightley). The argument between the two players is swept under the carpet without so much as a make-up conversion though, all to give more screentime to Jess's family. Bend It Like Beckham a delightful story that overcooks itself because it focuses far too heavily on the family, and not nearly enough on Jess. It would've been more powerful to only offer up one or two main ultimatums, rather than littering the movie with the family constantly finding out about the football. It's probably too much to ask for a bigger Beckham cameo, too.
