A Gen Z Reviews the Classics: 'Bend It Like Beckham' is still bending the rules, twenty-four years on

‘A Gen Z Reviews the Classics’ is a new weekly column on Firstpost. We revisit great books and films, and talk about why they remain relevant even today.

I must have been barely two years old when Bend It Like Beckham first hit screens. Like most classics, though, it never really left them, and I grew up on the reruns that flooded TV for years after, catching it on whatever channel had it playing before I got shooed off the remote.

Somewhere in my fuzzy, half-formed memory is the first sighting of a girl who looked closer to me than anything else onscreen had ever bothered to be. Not white, not one of the singing-and-dancing leads every other film on offer that decade seemed to hand its girls. She looked like she'd wandered in from my world and landed in theirs. That was the revelation—that she existed there at all.

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Twenty-four years later, with the World Cup taking over every dinner table conversation in my house, I went back to it for the first time as an adult. Bend It Like Beckham sits at the exact intersection of being Indian, being a girl, and having dreams you'd learn to keep quiet about. It is still, depressingly, one of the only mainstream films to have gone looking for that intersection.

Gurinder Chadha's 2002 comedy-drama follows Jesminder "Jess" Bhamra and Jules Paxton as they fight their way onto a women's football team, against Jess's family and, unassumingly, against the sport itself. It remains, reportedly, the only film ever officially released in every country in the world, North Korea included.

Bending it before you can name it

Re-watching this, what struck me is how little of the film's power comes from Jess actually winning arguments. She just refuses to stop wanting, first under the radar and then completely out in the open. It's a different engine than the one most coming-of-age films run on, where the lead performs rebellion to earn the right to have a dream. Jess is outspoken, but she never treats her culture as the obstacle and never feels ashamed about where she's from. It's rare to see a teenage character written this accurately, actually understanding what it feels like to be tunnel-visioned about the one thing you care about.

Jess’s father is the character I understand differently now, watching this with an adult's sense of what parents actually carry into their protectiveness. On the surface, he's a stereotype, the disapproving immigrant father, but the film goes looking for the reason behind the stereotype instead of just deploying it. He once tried to play cricket in England and got pushed off the team for being Indian, and that's the real source of his protectiveness, not tradition for tradition's sake. Underneath it, once he comes around, he's revealed to be such a girl dad, standing on the sidelines at her final match like he'd been waiting for permission to be that person the whole time.

Then there's Pinky, Jess's older sister. She performs the acceptable kind of womanhood in public while doing more or less what she likes behind her parents' backs. The film is never cruel to her for it. It lets you see that Pinky's compliance and Jess's defiance are just two different strategies for the same problem, not opposite personalities. It's that shared problem that keeps them close rather than pitting them against each other. Underneath the teasing and the wedding chaos, they're still on the same side. It's one of the smarter, less remarked-on choices in the script.

The same generosity extends to Tony, Jess's other close friend. The film sets him up like a possible love interest for her, the way these plots usually go, then drops that expectation altogether: he's into men, not her, and treats it as barely worth remarking on. There's no coming-out scene staged for anyone else's benefit, no suffering written in for sympathy either. He just gets to be Jess's best friend, steady and unbothered, without the film needing to make an issue of who he is.

A very British kind of cheek

The dry humour, the very specific council-park football pitches, the wedding-and-football-final scheduling conflict played entirely straight. None of it would translate the same way if it were set anywhere else. Even Joe's line to Jess, that he understands being called a slur on the pitch because he's Irish, works less as an actual political point and more as a joke Indians and Irish people are entitled to make at England's expense. It's a stretch as solidarity, sure, but Indians and Irish people do share a punchline: both know exactly what it's like to be screwed over by the same empire, and that's a kinship the film gets to have fun with instead of explaining.

And that's not incidental to why it landed so hard for the people I grew up around too. Most of us were raised on British media in a way that now feels almost accidental: Enid Blyton before we could clock the Britishness of it, talent shows we half-understood the references in, films exactly like this one. It may not be a universal Gen Z experience, but it was mine, and probably closer to the norm than not for anyone who grew up English-medium-schooled in urban India. There's a specific kind of fluency we ended up with in a culture that was never quite ours, absorbed sideways through television rather than handed down. Bend It Like Beckham being this British is exactly what let it smuggle in a story this specific about being Indian.

More than a friendly

There's barely another film from this era that's stayed this easy to drop into conversation, and a lot of that is because of what people online have decided it's really about. With Heated Rivalry and sports romances having a moment, it's worth saying: this film did it two decades before it had a name.

Scroll Letterboxd, and you'll find most reviews reading the Jess-and-Jules friendship as something more than platonic, an undeniable charge the film gestures at constantly and names never. It's there in the number of times the camera lingers a beat too long, in the fact that both their mothers seem more threatened by the idea of them being close than by either of them playing football at all.

Whether the original ending had them together and got rewritten under pressure from financiers is a claim I've seen repeated often enough to believe someone, somewhere. Still, I couldn't find it confirmed anywhere on record. Though the fact that this claim has survived this long says something about how badly people wanted it to be true, and maybe still do.

Jules doesn't get quite the same interiority Jess does, which is probably the film's biggest structural flaw in hindsight. Keira Knightley makes her feel fully formed anyway, all elbows and impatience and a barely-contained fury at being told to be softer than she is. It took me far too long to realise that sassy, hard-edged Jules and every other Keira Knightley period-drama heroine I grew up watching were the same actress, doing the same essential thing in different costumes.

Underneath the parents, the wedding, the tournament final, both girls are up against the same thing: a version of femininity neither of their mothers can picture past. The film never really untangles this; it just runs out the clock on it. Jess's father gives in, not because he's convinced, but because love wins out over rules by default. It's a softer ending than the film earns, honestly, after being sharper than that for most of its runtime.

Extra time

Writing this review about this film during an actual World Cup is a strange kind of gut check. FIFA has been promising pay equity between the men's and women's game since before the 2023 Women's World Cup, and the gap has narrowed, but not closed. Players at the last Women's World Cup still earned a fraction of what the men made the year before. The men's tournament that just wrapped paid out close to a billion dollars across its teams. The 2027 women's prize pool hasn't been announced yet.

What has changed, however, is who's playing. There are millions more women on the pitch in England alone than there were when this film came out, and Chadha herself is working on a sequel timed to land alongside the next Women's World Cup in 2027. She's reportedly been working with USWNT head coach Emma Hayes, who has said watching the original film as a young player changed the course of her career.

Whether the sequel finally lets Jess and Jules end up together, or lets two more women play the game without apologising for wanting it, is still an open question. I'd be more than happy to stick around and watch it get answered.