CAPS blog 4

                Bend it Like Beckham is a film about two girls who love soccer.  Jess is of Indian heritage and finds herself living in England with a love for soccer.  She has a David Beckham wall poster that she talks to regularly throughout the movie which is part of the title.  Her parents want her to focus on being the ideal Indian wife and finding an Indian man but Jess’ love of soccer keeps her from wanting the same thing as her parents.  Jess is given an opportunity to try out for one of the women’s leagues when she meets Jules.  Jules is English and doesn’t have the most supportive of parents either but together they try and make their dreams of coming to the United States and playing a professional women’s soccer league come true.  The movie is set in London and came out in 2002.  A major actress in the movie is Keira Knightley.  This movie fits well with the assignment because it shows the transition of an Indian family placed in England.

This movie showed two different cultures interacting.  The Indian culture which was the minority since the film was set in England and the British culture which was the dominant culture in this film setting.  One of the concepts seen in this film from Chapter 8 was the concept of separation.  Separation is a type of cultural adaption in which an individual retains his or her original culture while interacting minimally with other groups (Martin & Nakayama pg. 325).  Separation has deep root in intercultural communication.  It goes all the way back to when society started enslaving in each other and the notion of being better than somebody else first started.  More recent examples include the separation of black and white people in the United States.  This however became so extreme that it was classified as segregation.

                This movie is filled with examples of separation in the dialogue.  Most of the examples are supplied by the mother of Jess whose is rooted in her traditional Indian ways.  For example, she refers to the David Beckham poster owned by Jess as a “skin head boy” multiple times in the film.  Another scene in the movie is when Jess is inside the locker room with her teammates explaining why an Indian girl can only marry an Indian boy and not a white, black, or Muslim boy.  Separation is a dominating theme cast by the Indian family in Bend it Like Beckham.  After the wedding of Jess’ sister, a bunch of Indian women are sitting on a couch complaining about how British people cause an uproar every time an Indian group wants to have an event.  Overall this film does a good job portraying the difference between the two cultures and how the two cultures are able to intermix.