IN QUEST OF GLOBAL SPECTATORSHIP: GURINDER CHADHA’S BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM
IN QUEST OF GLOBAL SPECTATORSHIP: GURINDER CHADHA’S BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM

Summary/Abstract: The British director, Gurinder Chadha emerged out of this seminal moment of the Black Britain’s cultural history of the 1980s, when Afro-Caribbean and Asian artists set out to challenge British majority assumptions positioned around issues of identity as determined by race, class and gender. It was already in her two short films I am British But...(1989) and A Nice Arrangement (1991) that she started to explore the complexities of British Asian hybridised national and cultural identities, thus anticipating the sensitive treatment of these issues in her upcoming first feature film, Bhaji on the Beach, soon followed by a great commercial success of her second feature, Bend It Like Beckham. With “an outstanding 2 million at the UK box office over its opening weekend” (Baker 2002: 6), Bend It Like Beckham considerably surpassed the filmmakers’ expectations, earning Chadha the title “queen of the multi,” which could intriguingly refer, as rightly pointed out by Jigna Desai (2004: 68), both to multiplex cinemas and multiculturalism. What was most significant though was the feature’s marketing campaign, which right from the outset put an emphasis on the film’s Britishness. The film’s promotion poster, reading “This is the best British comedy since Bridget Jones’s Diary,” made an explicit link between Chadha’s production and a recent success story of British cinema, and in doing so, also marked the film’s mainstream potential.

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