With a start as a news reporter and documentarian, creating work for the BBC, Chadha won international acclaim for her third feature, the romantic comedy Bend it Like Beckham (2002). (Stay through the credits and hear "I'll Stand By You Always," which Springsteen wrote for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone but which Chris Columbus wasn't able to use.)īorn in Kenya and raised in London, Gurinder Chadha is an independent British filmmaker whose seven award-winning films have won acclaim at festivals, broken UK box office records, and received nominations from the Golden Globes, BAFTA, European Film Academy, and The Writers Guild of America. Gurinder Chadha ( Bend it Like Beckham) based her film on Greetings from Bury Park, a memoir by journalist and screenwriter Sarfraz Manzoor, and cast it in the crowd-pleasing mode of other music-equals-freedom uplifters like Say Anything., High Fidelity, or Footloose. Javed's schoolmates are more interested in dandyish New Wave, but The Boss's music does catch the ear of his politically conscious crush Eliza, and it eventually inspires Javed to approach her, to write, and to believe in himself.
But when a friend gives Javed a Bruce Springsteen mixtape, he suddenly discovers that although he wasn't born in the U.S.A., he was definitely born to run-and "Dancing in the Dark" explodes onto the soundtrack (and the lyrics onto the screen) for a set piece somewhere between an '80s music video and a Bollywood production number. It's worse if you, like Javed (Viveik Kalra), are pressured by your embittered workaholic father, worse still if you're Pakistani and menaced by racist skinheads.
During the doldrums of the Thatcher years, there's not much for a bright teenager to do in the drab factory town of Luton, England, except plot how to get out.