FOOTBALL isn’t just a matter of life and death for some people. It’s way more important than that. In the purgatory that football fans refer to as the period between the last second of league football and the first kickoff of the next football season, fans have been known to do some pretty strange things. The only proven way to kill time is to watch a movie about football. The next best thing to watching football on TV is watching a football movie on TV.

Movies like Jerry Maguire and Heaven Can Wait are part of a long tradition of football films. But what broke this tradition of Disney rolling out some formulaic, based-on-a-true-story, feel-good athletic flick was Goal in 2006. This is a movie that strays from the formula, and scores big. A lot of sports films focus on the underdog, the unexpected heroes who overcome unbelievable odds to achieve some glorious victory.

All of that gets straightened out in the film’s first half, leaving the remainder to begin exploring what happens when the little guy becomes the top dog.

Football cannot be shown through the movies. For that, we have the sports channels. What most football-based movies do is take the game as a metaphor and revolve around it, trying to convey their individual message through the film. One such reason why football has featured in movies such as Bend it like Beckham, She’s the man and Offside are to show how the man’s domain is larger than the woman’s and what women have to go through in order to transgress the boundaries. The fairer sex is generally not supposed to enter the arena of soccer. The official reason: lots of foul language and the soccer players have their legs showing. But of course, it’s really a case of sexism.

Bend It Like Beckham is a spirited, good-natured coming of age comedy that encompasses the immi

grant experience, gender identity and family expectations with an engaging, natural ease. For any girl whose athletic endeavours were ever questioned by conservative parents, Bend It... is a colour-drenched fairytale where you know from the opening credits that the story will end in the happily-ever-after category for our plucky heroine. Yes, this sunny little movie is about second generation Indian families in England striving to maintain traditions that kids, more British than Indian, find increasingly irrelevant.

In the language of soccer, to be offside is to have gone too far, to have crossed an invisible line past which it is forbidden to go. As the exceptional Iranian film Offside demonstrates, if you are a woman in Iran, just attempting to go to a men’s soccer game puts you over that line and into territory that is completely out of bounds. The best part of this movie is that it’s a sports movie in which the game takes place entirely out of sight. A cross between socially conscious cinema and the irrepressible, Offside is a charming, character-driven film that conveys enormous feeling for its people. These include both the determined young women for whom soccer is more important than food and the over-matched soldiers whose heart really isn’t in keeping them away from the World Cup qualifying match they are determined to see. Excellently scripted, the film challenges patriarchal authority with an almost absurd freshness. ❚❚