ABSTRACT
Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham entered the global cinematic space through limited release in March 2003, achieving worldwide distribution in August 2003, remaining in release for 226 days/32.3 weeks, its widest release encompassing 1,002 theaters. 1 With a U.S. domestic box-office gross of $32,543,449 and an international gross of $44,039,884, the film was hardly a blockbuster on the order of Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006) with its $594,239,066 worldwide gross; however, in the words of Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, it was
a steamroller sensation at the British box office, becoming not only the first film by a nonwhite Briton to reach No. 1 over there, but also ending up as that country’s top-grossing British-financed and -distributed film ever. 2
Labeled by the Guardian as the “most commercial film director of her generation,” 3 Gurinder Chadha was awarded an Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday honors list in June 2006. On being offered the OBE, Chadha was not even momentarily tempted to refuse it or give it back, as Benjamin Zephaniah and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown had done recently. 4 “Quite the opposite,” she says in an interview with Geraldine Bedell in The Observer:I think my ancestors would have been thoroughly pleased. One reason I got it, I think, is that I show contemporary Britain to the outside world. I’m only able to do that—my Britain is only like it is—because of the history of the last 500 years. 5
Gurinder Chadha, director of Bend It Like Beckham (2002). Courtesy of Photofest. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203152416/e9bd0042-248b-47da-bf10-b23f2383016c/content/fig9_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> In the same interview, Chadha also declares that the reason that she tells stories through cinema is because her remit is “ultimately about racism. It's about the ways to diminish the impact of difference.” 6 Caught between the perceived “non-Briton-ness” of the director and Chadha's claim that it is her Britain is the valiant attempt to “diminish the impact of difference,” an attempt dear to advocates of multiculturalism and one of the reasons that the film became such a crowd-pleaser not only in the United Kingdom, but in the rest of the Anglophone world where difference threatens to tear apart a hegemonic social fabric.