On the Ball

Beckham Call: Director Gurinder Chadha on the set.

Gurinder Chadha on making “the ultimate girl-power movie.”

by Cindy Fuchs

Gurinder Chadha is drinking tea. She’s the liveliest tea drinker I’ve ever seen. Full of energy, she’s not about to sit on a sofa in a nice hotel for an entire interview. She gets up and walks about. She leans forward, then sits back. She answers the hotel phone, after wondering out loud if she should, and speaks briefly with her husband and writing partner, Paul Mayeda Berges. They’re doing notes on their new movie, she explains, smiling broadly, a musical adaptation of Pride and Prejudice she describes as "Bollywood meets Fiddler on the Roof."

Chadha plainly loves her work. Born in Kenya, she began her career as a news reporter with BBC Radio, and directed short documentaries for the BBC. In 1990, she established her own production company, Umbi Films, and made her first feature, Bhaji on the Beach, in 1993. She directed What's Cooking? in 2000, about four Los Angeles families on Thanksgiving, and now, her latest project, Bend It Like Beckham, about Jess (Parminder Nagra) and Jules (Keira Knightley), young footballers aspiring to play professionally. It was one of Britain's highest grossing films in 2002.

Chadha says that she wanted to "create a movie with images of girls who were all sorts -- tall, fat, thin, small or whatever, but all looking really powerful, confident and happy with what they were doing, happy with their bodies." For her, Beckham is "the ultimate kind of girl-power movie, because it doesn't belittle the girls' experience. It's a teen movie with balls, so to speak."

Partly based on her own experiences, Beckham reflects the complexities of living across cultures, indeed, in a "diasporic culture." She sees it as portraying the "nuts and bolts of integration. That's what it's about, that process of being second-generation or third-generation Indian, very specifically in London." She smiles, remembering, "I was plagued all through school with people saying, ŒOh, you must be in an identity crisis,' or ŒThere's a big culture clash going on,' which just made me bristle, because we just didn't feel that."

Noting that the film might be marketed as a "soccer movie, a teen comedy or a family picture," Chadha acknowledges the difficulty of making movies that don't quite fit familiar frameworks. "This is a problem for me," she says, "but also a pleasure. I keep making films that don't fit genres, so they're hard to market. But that's what our lives are about: You don't think, today I'm going to just be a teenager, and tomorrow I'll deal with race. It's everything all at once."

Chadha has particular ideas about what movies can do. "I came into films initially on this platform to challenge the representation of women and people of color in the media. I wanted to use the camera, which is so powerful, to change the way that people are portrayed. It's my instinct to pull the carpet out from you."

After the next movie, which she says she's calling Bride and Prejudice, Chadha imagines doing films that aren't necessarily "about weddings and girls and marriage." But, she adds, "even if I do a sci-fi movie, I'll bring my world to it, it will have the undercurrents of identity and culture and the sense of diversity or camaraderie, in metaphorical terms."

Bend It Like Beckhamopens Friday at Ritz Bourse.