We are still dreaming Bend It Like Beckham

The iconic Bend It Like Beckham was released more than twenty years ago. Beckham, on the other hand, the documentary in which the former footballer recounts the ups and downs of his life, has only been available on Netflix for a few days, but immediately became one of the most watched products of the moment, confirming how big Beckham's cultural influence on sport and pop culture still is. The Gurinder Chadha directed film exploited the football talent's name for two main reasons. The first was to provide a kind of snapshot of the time when the fan base around the athlete had already reached disproportionate proportions. Secondly, David's name was used in a catchy way, as a kind of bait to draw the viewers' attention to other subjects.

Bend it like Beckham is one of the films grouped under the name of ethnic comedy, i.e. film projects that satirise aspects of ethnic and cultural traditions. For those who don't remember, the plot of the film revolves around the story of Jessminder, an eighteen-year-old girl from an Indian family who has recently immigrated to the UK and plays in the ranks of a men's team and then joins an amateur women's club. And yes, although the film takes its name from the young girl's adoration of David Beckham, the figure of the athlete is mainly used to highlight the differences between Jessminder and her family. Namely, the parents do not accept that their daughter could be interested in football and David Beckham in any way, because the very fact that football can arouse girls' interest was and is a taboo in several cultures. In the film, the figure of Beckham is even elevated to the status of a deity; he is the only loophole for Jess to escape the reality in which she is 'trapped' and from which she would like to emancipate herself.

Bend it like Beckham is therefore also a cinematic testimony to how much and to what extent women's football was on the rise worldwide. For this reason, it is important to mention the story about the sports bra that Jules Paxton (played by Keira Knightley) wore while training with the team. That same sports bra made women's football history when Brandi Chastain kicked the penalty that sent the USA triumphant in front of the Pasadena crowd in the 1999 Women's World Cup final, jubilantly taking off her game jersey like her male counterpart. For this cheer, which aesthetically equated women's football with men's football, Chastain was targeted by the media and public opinion, but she became an icon.

So do we really still dream of David Beckham? Never more so than today. If David was the salvation of Jessminder's life, so it was for so many young people approaching football at the time. A world that has changed radically in the intervening years and changed the protagonists in the process. If at the beginning of the millennium the figure of Beckham was shrouded in a mythological aura that could only be approached by learning to pass the ball flush with the hoop, twenty years later it is the footballer himself who displays all his strengths and weaknesses. The flesh-and-blood figure of Beckham also represents these twenty years in which the history of football and its protagonists has lost some of its machismo and elitist veil - a process in which Beckham has participated throughout his career by imposing a new model of the footballer.

Two decades after Gurinder Chadha's film, young female footballers no longer need to find a role model in men to pursue their passion. They can imagine a professional career by dreaming instead of the many successful female footballers and their example of emancipation. Like Brandi Chastain, who was the role model for the character played by Keira Knightley, whose sports bra became the symbol of a revolution.