|
This
week's featured review & film archive
Sarah Jaffe reviews independent and foreign
films,
in addition to reporting the latest buzz behind
Colorado's film festivals.
Bend It Like Beckham
--2002, Gurinder
Chadha
The cliché “feel-good flick”
has been done almost to death, but Bend it Like
Beckham honestly deserves that title.
One doesn’t have to be a football (soccer,
for us Americans) fan to understand the simple
conflict of this movie: Jess (Parminder Negra)
wants to play, and her orthodox Sikh parents think
she’d be better off learning to cook so
that she can catch a husband. One doesn’t
have to be a genius to figure out how the movie
is going to end, either. No surprises here, but
there are lots of laughs, and the movie left me
feeling better about the world than I did when
I entered the theater.
The England of this film never has overcast day,
let alone rain, and the screen pops with color--especially
at Jess’s sister’s wedding. The music
is equally vibrant, and the movie manages to poke
fun at the overbearing parents while at the same
time celebrating their traditions. The Sikhs aren’t
the only ones to laugh at here, either: Jules,
Jess’s English friend, has an equally overbearing
mother who hilariously thinks her daughter is
a lesbian because she plays football.
Lovely supporting performances by Keira Knightley
as Jules, Juliet Stevenson as Jules’s mother,
and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers makes you understand
why Jess and Jules are willing to fight over him,
but easily the best performances are from Anupam
Kher and Shaheen Khan as Jess’s parents.
This movie was one hundred percent pure fun, and
made me want to run out and join a soccer team.
---------------------------------
Divine Intervention
-- 2001, Elia Suleiman
Divine Intervention was at times confusing--the
only clear impression that I had at the end of
the film was Jews=bad, Palestinians=good.
At some points, the movie did an excellent job
of showing how difficult it is to live as a Palestinian
in Israel. The love between the two leads, if
they can be called that, was excellently shown,
all without a single word. But a few scenes crossed
the line between poignant and propaganda.
The best parts of this film were a series of vignettes
showing the lives of a group of neighbors. They
were funny, and at the same time made an impression
about how miserable people can be to each other.
As one of the characters says (in one of this
movie’s very few lines); “Neighbors
should respect one another.” Very little
of this film is spoken--its power is in images,
and most of the words spoken serve simply as punch
lines.
I wanted to like Divine Intervention. It made
me laugh and it made me think. But I was also
alienated by a few pointedly political scenes
that I think actually lessened the effect of the
film. One such scene involved a balloon with the
face of Yasser Arafat, which started out funny,
with Israeli soldiers debating whether or not
to shoot it down as it passed the checkpoint,
but ended with the balloon sailing over a temple
and a church to settle on the top of a mosque
in Jerusalem. Another scene ended with a large
Palestinian flag appearing over Israeli soldiers.
The point that the Palestinians are not treated
well came across best in the scenes between the
lovers forced to meet in their car at the checkpoint
because they could not cross it, and flag-raising
and painting Arafat as a saint lessened the effect
of the film.
Perhaps the revenge fantasies of the director/star
hit too close to home for me: although they hardly
glorified suicide bombings and the like, they
also seemed to be a step on the road toward that
type of thought.
|
