Why Bend It Like Beckham Is The Only Good Keira Knightley Movie
After 'Bend It Like Beckham', Knightley was never quite the same.
In celebration of the 20th anniversary of Bend It Like Beckham, Junkee is spending the week digging into the impact and legacy of the iconic film.
Twenty years ago, Bend It Like Beckham launched Keira Knightley’s career. Afterwards, she was never quite the same.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been two decades since we first saw Jess (Parminder Nagra) and Jules (Keira Knightley) take to the football field. Both actresses delivered pitch-perfect performances — Nagra, who caught the attention of director Gurinder Chadha during a theatre performance, was brilliantly cast as the third culture kid navigating the concerns of her Punjabi parents with her intense passion for football; while Knightley shined as Jules, a fellow footballer dealing with her own motherly chagrin.
One thing I love about Bend It Like Beckham is that what the girls physically look like is irrelevant to the story, something that unfortunately remains revolutionary to this day. So often, women exist in cinema in a strictly decorative sense; adorning the lives of men and their relatively rich inner lives (Manic Pixie Dream Girl, anyone?). In Bend It Like Beckham, women are not incidental to the plot — they are its protagonists — grappling with parental expectations around femininity that link to broader ideologies about the place of women in sport in general.
Knightley seemed to fully inhabit her role as Jules, Jess’ partner-in-arms — she was fiery, determined, and pissed-off, like so many teenage girls actually are.
After Jess And Jules
That Nagra wouldn’t achieve global stardom was predictable. The Leicester-born actress was about a decade older than Knightley when she debuted in the British film, and resolutely not white. And while both Knightley and Nagra were both beautiful and thin, Nagra committed the cardinal early 2000s sin of having curves.
Nagra ended up getting poached for a long-term gig playing Dr Neela Rasgotra on ER, and Knightley — who was 16 when Bend It Like Beckham filmed — went on to play various objects of desire in 2003’s Love Actually, The Pirates Of The Caribbean, The Jacket, and a 2007 movie called Silk (which I hadn’t heard of until now and boasts a seven percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Wow).
Hollywood, a notoriously discriminatory industry, passed over Nagra in favour of Knightley, who was recruited into roles that offered a litany of parts that more closely resembled cardboard cut-outs of women than they did flesh and bone. Apart from her role in Bend It Like Beckham, I’ve never come across a Keira Knightley character that struck me as an actual human. Like the coiffed flowing locks that Keira that leading women in Hollywood seem required to don by stipulation, the roles hung awkwardly on the actress, who seemed to never comfortably embody any of her post-Jules characters.
How Hollywood Flattens Women
Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising. Hollywood has long flattened female characters; reduced them to their aesthetic form. Unlike Bend It Like Beckham, directed by British-Asian woman Gurinder Chadha, the films Knightley featured in later were pretty much exclusively directed by men: Richard Curtis (Love Actually), Gore Verbinski (Pirates of The Caribbean), Joe Wright (Atonement, Pride and Prejudice, and Anna Karenina), Mark Romanek (Never Let Me Go), David Cronenberg (A Dangerous Method), Paul Westmoreland (Collette), Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game), John Carney (Begin Again), and James Kent (The Aftermath).
Knightley was everywhere, but her success came with a sting with a tail: she was stuck, beholden to the male gaze. As Knightley herself said in 2007, “I’m completely aware that my face gets me work”. And in my opinion, being directed by men for 20 years means that Knightley was not given the room to fully realise her potential.
Aside from Jules, I never found any of Keira Knightley’s characters believable. All I saw was Keira Knightley, trying to act. But there’s only so much you can do within the confines of the male imagination.
The British film theorist Laura Mulvey explains that women in cinema have historically been linked to desire, that their presence was primarily about their visual impact or what she coined “to-be-looked-at-ness”. Take, for example, the famous fountain scene in Atonement, when Knightley dips into a fountain and emerges with a laced slip clinging to her body as Robbie (James McAvoy) looks on.
Here, Knightley’s role is to be “simultaneously looked at and displayed”, while McAvoy’s is to bear that gaze. It’s the perfect example of how Hollywood has traditionally depicted women. I mean, what woman acts like this? Literally no one. But that’s not the point. As Mulvey writes, Hollywood is all about the “satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure”, with women as the central object in the creation of this pleasure.
A similar logic applies to Knightley’s role as Elizabeth in Pirates of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl, where she plays a character so helpless that she declares “I can’t breathe” before simply falling into the ocean. She’s not there to add narrative thrust to the story. She’s there to be seen.
“I’m completely aware that my face gets me work.”
Interestingly, Knightley said in a podcast with director Lulu Wang last year that she would no longer be filming sex scenes for male directors, adding that she feels “very uncomfortable [with] the male gaze,” and that she’d “rather not stand in front of a group of men naked”. She also added that the limited characterisation that women are given, in terms of playing either a mother or a flirt, “makes [her] sick”.
In Bend It Like Beckham, neither Knightley nor Nagra had to succumb to these forces. Jules and Jess were not on screen for the benefit of male aesthetic pleasure, nor were they careened into a box. This was a film about teenage girls pushing against gendered expectations, finding pleasure on the football field, and pushing forward on their own terms.
Add that to the fact that Nagra, a woman of colour, was slated to play the film’s lead, and you’ve got a film that’s much more subversive than the cheery Britcom poster lets on.
The Case For More Diverse Directors
Both Nagra and Knightley’s careers after Bend It Like Beckham have probably made this point obvious: when it comes to directors, we are in urgent need of more — for want of a better word — diversity. In 2022, it shouldn’t be acceptable that around 88 percent of Hollywood’s blockbusters are directed by men who are overwhelmingly white.
Perhaps a more equitable industry would’ve been to give Nagra the rich and varied career that she deserved; or a chance for Knightley to play characters that existed in 3D.
This isn’t to say that straight white men can’t also create subversive films that centre women’s experiences, or the experiences of people of colour, or queer people — or that Bend It Like Beckham is only great because it was made by a woman of colour. But minorities tend to have a headstart when it comes to making art that challenges the dominant gaze.
And the fact that we’re still talking about Bend It Like Beckham — some 20 years after it premiered — is a testament to that.
Reena Gupta is Junkee’s senior culture writer. Follow her on Twitter.