2023-07-29 13:51:57
Culture Women’s Soccer World Cup
In the end, the wrong people kiss
Status: 1:51 p.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes
Parminder Nagra (l.) und Keira Knighley in “Kick it like Beckham”
Quelle: picture alliance/United Archives/KPA
Today, the women’s soccer World Cup is broadcast on all channels, but the sport only arrived in the mainstream 20 years ago – with “Kick it like Beckham”. As precisely as the film hit the zeitgeist at the time: there was one thing he still didn’t dare to do.
Three women’s World Cups in the 1990s passed without much media attention. For the first European title, the DFB had given the players of his wife coffee service as a bonus. Also, sports movies were box office poison. But a British filmmaker of Indian origin had an obsession: the first major film about women’s football! When financiers on the island remained skeptical, Gurinder Chadha turned to Wim Wenders’ company Road Movies. Bring a script. Wenders’ partner Ulrich Felsberg bit.
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Timing is everything in cinema. “Kick it like Beckham” was released in cinemas exactly one year before the 2003 Women’s World Cup – the phrase “women’s soccer World Cup” has fallen out of favor because “women’s soccer” has long been used derogatory. The plot went like this: Jess (Parminder Nagra), daughter of a London-based family with Indian roots, plays soccer with boys in the park against her parents’ wishes, including her best friend Tony, who is gay.
Jess is persuaded by bio-English Jules (Keira Knightley) to join her women’s soccer team; Jule’s mother thinks her daughter is a lesbian because she plays in a club. Moving on, Joe (women’s soccer coach) falls in love with Jess, and a US talent scout offers Jess and Jules a scholarship to America. In the end, Jess and Joe kiss at the airport, Jules flies across the pond with Jess, and their parents accept their daughter’s love of soccer.
Keira Knightley als Jules
Quelle: picture alliance/United Archives/KPA
There was nothing to complain about. Everything is included: conservative immigrant families, homosexuality, xenophobia, jealousy, offended pride, British humor. And above all: football as a means of liberating women from traditional gender roles. The film topped the UK box office for three weeks (although it was then succeeded by the men’s film About a Boy), and the following year’s World Cup marked the media breakthrough for women’s football. “Kick it like Beckham” was even shown on North Korean state television
After all, the DFB allowed their eleven to win the title and gave them a bonus of 15,000 euros per player. At the World Cup in Australia it would be 250,000 euros, which is still 150,000 less than the German men would get for an (admittedly unlikely) World Cup win.
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There are sports where bonuses are equal, as in the Grand Slam tournaments in tennis, but that always has something to do with the spectacle on offer, and the ladies and gentlemen in Wimbledon are hardly inferior in their spectacles, what cannot yet be said of women’s and men’s football. Maybe women just have to wait and see until men’s football, in its greed for money and its sell-out to dubious billionaires, will have done itself out.
Crush on the Coach: Young Jess (Parminder Nagra) and her Joe (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) in Kick It Like Beckham
What: picture-alliance/obs
Anyway, looking back, there are a few things that stand out about Kick It Like Beckham. First, the American distributor requested a title change to “Move it like Mia” to capitalize on the popularity of soccer icon Mia Hamm, which would have excluded male viewers in the rest of the world. Of course, Joe is still a man who coaches the women’s soccer team (also very useful for the plot). And finally, the chaste treatment of the subject of “homosexuality” is striking. Basically, the whole plot of the film boils down to a lesbian relationship between Jess and Jules, and early in the script the two also had a crush on each other.
No one dared to do that back then – just as being gay in men’s football is still taboo today – in contrast to the current Women’s World Cup: The OutSports website counted 95 female players (out of a total of 736) who had come out as LGBTQ.
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