In 2022, Bend It Like Beckham’s Exploration Of Generational Trauma Feels More Relevant Than Ever
Turning Red and Encanto may have explored generational trauma at Oscar-worthy levels, but Bend It Like Beckham did it first.
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.
As a daughter of Korean immigrants who moved here to Australia in the early 2000s, Bend It Like Beckham was more than just a badass sports movie. There are parts of it I still can’t watch without choking back tears.
An early noughties time capsule, the film follows Jesminder “Jess” Bhamra (Parminder Nagra), the 18-year-old daughter of a British-Indian family in London, who wants to play soccer professionally, despite her parents’ disapproval. Sporting aspirations aside, the film’s central plot is relatable concept to those with immigrant parents.
Jess’ relationship with her parents tackled themes of generational trauma way ahead of its time. Twenty years on from the film’s release, it feels more relevant than ever.
What I Missed As A Kid
The arguments that Jess has with her parents throughout the movie hit a little too close to home for anyone with parents who immigrated to a new country. Strong discouragement from any risky career paths, pressure to date someone of the same culture, and a growing cultural gap that makes communication harder and harder — welcome to our world.
In one of the final scenes of Bend It Like Beckham, Jess announces to her parents that she missed part of her sister’s wedding to play in her league final and got scouted for a scholarship in the US.
Her mum immediately starts scolding her for wanting to go all the way to another country. But her dad Mohaan (Anupam Kher) responds by recounting the time he was kicked out of the local cricket club, simply because he was Indian, and felt like he couldn’t do anything about it, suffering in silence. Despite ongoing tensions between Jess and her parents throughout the film, in this scene, Mohaan declares that his daughter shouldn’t make the same mistakes he once did. Instead, he urges her to take the scholarship and fight.
When I watched the movie as a kid, it was easy to relate to Jess in defying her strict parents and chasing after her dreams — but years of having similar disagreements with my conservative Asian parents has since given me a fresh perspective. Jess’ parents, especially her dad, wanted to protect her from the harsh realities of being an immigrant. Being insulted or rejected purely because of your race is both deeply painful and emotionally numbing. You can’t do anything about your race, so you feel like you can’t do anything about racism either.
But those final triumphant moments of Mohaan, finding the strength to fight again by encouraging Jess to take the scholarship (and finally playing cricket again) make me hopeful that we can all somehow move forward.
What Is Intergenerational Trauma Exactly?
Intergenerational trauma is certainly not a new concept, but it is one that seems to have really found itself in an unexpected genre: kids’ movies.
The term was coined from studies that looked at the children of Holocaust survivors and other deeply traumatic events. They found that the impacts of trauma that happened in earlier generations could be passed down and continue to affect families for generations to come. It’s still a relatively new area of study and it’s been extended to include different kinds of trauma that can affect multiple generations through unhealthy behaviour patterns and attitudes.
Being able to put a name to this experience felt like letting go of a breath I didn’t know I was holding. After realising this was a shared — and studied — experience, I quickly recognised it in movies like Encanto and Hereditary (two very different genres, I know) showing how previous family traumas can really hurt later generations. Other stories like Minari and Turning Red explore it with that additional lens of the second-generation immigrant experience that seems to be universally experienced across cultures.
Dealing with the extra baggage from our parents’ generation sometimes feels like a burden we have to carry alone while we’re growing up. But if there’s anything I learned from Jess and Mohaan, it’s that overcoming generational trauma is a journey that parents and children need to navigate together.
Sure, Bend It Like Beckham is definitely Jess’ story at its core, but Mohaan’s journey from desperately wanting to protect his daughter from his own trauma, respecting her ability to choose for herself, to taking cues from her resolve by picking up the cricket bat again can’t ever be forgotten.
Lia Kim is a Korean-Australian writer, producer, and host of The Junkee Takeaway. Her parents wanted her to be a doctor or lawyer but the closest she got was bingeing Grey’s Anatomy and Suits. She’s on most socials @kimliaa.