In April of 2002, the film Bend It Like Beckham premiered in the UK, and was eventually shown around the world. The studio wasn't all that confident about the film. It was a sports movie starring two women, one of them South Asian, with all the men in subordinate roles. And it was written and directed by a South Asian woman, Gurinder Chadha. Yet BILB grossed more than $104 million on a $6 million budget.
BILB was a very different movie for its time, and it filled a niche that filmmakers had neglected. Women, especially young women, made up half the movie audience, but rarely saw themselves as more than window dressing in movies. Bend It Like Beckham showed that women can care about sports more than they care about finding a man. Women's soccer wasn't much twenty years ago, but today's teams fill seats and bring glory to their nations. Many current stars of women's soccer were inspired to go all out by watching BILB when they were children. The movie was also the first, outside of Bollywood, to focus on a young South Asian woman, 18-year-old soccer player Jess Bhamra (Parminder Nagra). Millions of young girls were thrilled to see an actress in a leading role who looked like them, and who dealt with the same dismissal, bigotry, and culture clashes that were part of their lives.
One part of BILB that doesn't hold up twenty years later is the romance with the coach, which wasn't part of the original story. It was shoehorned in at the studio's insistence. Otherwise, the heart of the movie focuses on the fierce and sometimes ambiguous friendship between Jess and Jules Paxton (Keira Knightley). BILB has no gunfire, no super powers, no crime, no car chase, very little bloodshed, and no male leads. It was a breath of fresh air to the millions of people who could relate to something in it. Read an oral history of how Bend It Like Beckham came about from the people who made it, and you might want to watch the movie once again. -via Metafilter