Does the British English hinder U.S. viewers’ ability to love this
film? Not o’ bit o’ i’!
Subsections:
A duo of two striving young athlete-women, of different races, aided by
a male coach
A tale of an athlete as aspiring artist emerging from reluctant family,
brought home by winning actresses
What is Sikhism?
Characters and related plot bits
Who helmed the film, especially director Chadha
A crux-type moment rendered well by Nagra: Keeping true to a career
love, based in part on key self-respect
[Please be patient if you seek updates; logistics make speed a little tricky here. A few edits done 3/9/13. More edits 3/12/13.]
A break: this film isn’t about
“the squalid indignities of the profit motive” (to use a phrase turned by
Joseph Heller in Catch-22), but about
hopes, achievement, family, and love (of another person, or a goal in life).
Let’s parse this fun roller-coaster.
I like this movie a lot, and
have watched it several times over the years—including, I think, when it was
first released in theaters in the U.S. I must admit that perhaps the
biggest bar to U.S. viewers’ watching it more is the British language—the
accents, the idioms, the way they elide some words—which even gives me a run
for my money, with some lines still obscure to me after I’ve seen this film
perhaps eight to 10 times.
But a few things make it work for us Americans (you know, there’s American English and British English, and depending on your
viewpoint, you could call American English “stupid English,” which I would be
persuaded to agree with, given what standard copy editing, such as I’ve done
for years, is expected to do): the
simple and appealing aspects of the story—the sports-story qualities will be
very familiar to American sports lovers—and the generally very accessible
performances of the main actors, especially the British/Indian Parminder Nagra, who would later have a role in a several-year U.S. TV series, and the Englishwoman Keira Knightley,
whose breakout role this film provides, and who has been a solidly bankable
actress for some years now.
A duo of two striving young athlete-women, of different races, aided by
a male coach
In its broadest outlines, the
story is about the prerogatives, strivings, finaglings, etc. of a youth with
talent and aspirations, versus the tradition of her background and (for certain
ethnic groups) the grip of family (due in part to parental control). Nagra’s
Jesminder (“Jess”) Bhamra and Knightley’s Juliette (“Jules”) Paxton are two
girls in the London area—the latter, Jules, a white Briton, has already been
playing in a local girls’ “football” club, the Hounslow Harriers—yes,
Americans, the sport here is soccer, the most popular sport in the world
outside the U.S., and called “football” at least in Britain. (Sorry, I will
refer to it “ethnocentrically” as soccer,
just to keep my head straight as I write this entry.)
By chance, Jules spies Jess
playing informally with young men in a public park, and gets her to join her
local girls’ team. It is coached, by the way, by a strict young man named Joe
(played authoritatively but approachably by Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who
used to play in a men’s soccer team, but was permanently sidelined by a knee
injury, and who has also had a conflicted relationship with his demanding
father.
Joe thus channels his will to
excel within soccer by coaching the girls’ team, and Jules is his star
player—and when Jules brings Jess on board, Joe is initially skeptical of her,
but sees Jess’s skill and spirit, and invites her in. The rest of the film
traces Jess’s will to remain a prospect on the soccer team—it turns out, both
she and Jess become prime “fruit to pick” for an American soccer scout expected
to come to a final season game that features the Harriers.
In the process, Jess encounters
a million hurdles, mostly in her own family’s disapproval of soccer as a career
route (or temporary detour) for her. Jules’s own mother similarly frowns on Jules’s
commitment to soccer, and wants her to be more of a girly girl and
marriageable, plus with a more normal career.
A tale of an athlete as aspiring artist emerging from reluctant family,
brought home by winning actresses
This story should seem familiar
enough—one of the “artist” driven to aim toward a striving career, running into
resistance from the conservative inclinations of the family—and there are a large
number of subplots, including amusing little vignettes regarding homosexuality
and lesbianism, among other things. The movie might seem dense and a little
manic storyline-wise, but if you watch it a few times, it has a lot of charm in
its packed-together ingredients. It keeps moving, with many scenes short; there
is interesting photography (including action shots within soccer games that
stir excitement) and a host of song choices (the soundtrack is almost all
“needle-drop” song snippets), and when you can’t always understand the British actors’
speaking, the sheer emotion of the scenes carries you through or allows you
enough “delayed-reaction” understanding.
The net result is a film with a
lot of positive amid the tribulations, and while Jules’s character, despite her
appeal, is on the spoiled and occasional-pouty side, Nagra’s Jess is the
richest emotionally. Indeed, what is a hallmark of this film for American
audiences is that Nagra brings the strength of an actor that transcends mere
physical appearance or “received/marketed personality as the predominant
attribute.” If we start to get uneasy with, say, a famous young American
actress’s being at risk of becoming “too familiar,” freighted with too-high
expectations, or perhaps even “too full of herself,” and thus she perhaps appears more as the star in future films than she disappears artistically into her
character, Nagra disarms us with a kind of pure art. She comes on screen as a
dark-skinned, black-haired, and black-eyed Indian, but with a pretty enough
face, and a bodily shape and bearing like a somewhat pre-sexual 16-year-old
(Nagra was actually about 26 when she performed this role), and she sells the
entire heart and heroism of the film in her rich portrayal. Only occasionally
does she chatter lines out as to sound a little incomprehensible; the vast majority
of the time, she is fine, and with her British accent she can carve out dishes
of emotion for our consideration along with her intelligently delivered words,
and we really follow her every twist and turn in the plot, with caring.
Though Knightley would become
the bigger star, and she makes a distinctive debut here, it is Nagra who
provides the essential central character, without which Knightley’s Jules might
seem a thin central character. So this film is one that, despite its many
“non-American” attributes, allows us to appreciate just what unites us in the
stories that film is meant to convey: character striving, pains, and triumphs made
“ours” by an actress who delivers these no matter her background—because the real “ethnicity” involved is how
she delivers the arrival of her character’s destiny by means of her broad heart
and intelligence, and Nagra’s achievement in this anchors the film if nothing
else does.
The film opened in Great Britain in 2002, and I think it first
played in the U.S.
the next year. It seems from a different time, but what a treat it is today,
amid our current jaundiced and winter-tossed lives. (For current news related to David Beckham, whom I deliberately don't review a lot here because of lack of "expertise" on him or soccer, see this or his Wikipedia bio.)
What is Sikhism?
One of the various ethnic
strains of this film’s story should be reviewed. What is the Sikh religion?
People in New Jersey might especially be advised to take notice, because in
this state, one of the very few in the U.S. where attendants are still required
to pump gas at gasoline stations for customers, many drivers may have noticed
that a Sikh is often who waits on them: sometimes an older man with a turban
and beard and maybe even prayer beads, but often young men without turban. This
is a religious subgroup of the Indian ethnic group—the main religion of that
country is Hinduism—and this film gives as opportune a lesson in Sikhism as any
notable film out there in the past decade (though it takes some outside
research to get a grip on some of it—as I do, not easily).
The following is by no means
meant to be complete, but a taste that allows you to do further research if you
desire. Sikhism started in the 1400s (by the Western calendar), under a guru
named Nanak, who became the first of 10 gurus who defined the teachings and
history of the religion. It was initially meant to reconcile to some extent the
teachings of Hinduism and Islam after Muslim invaders had conquered parts of
what would later be northern India.
(The picture on the wall of the Bhamra house, which they evidently hold in some
kind of reverence—though not as if it
were an idol—is of Guru Nanak; apparently, adherents of the religion have
settled on a standardized portrait of Nanak, and this is it. [If any Sikhs are
troubled by my thumbnail sketch of their religion here, they may contact me at bootstrp@warwick.net; expect a delay
before a response.])
The Sikh community is located
mainly in what today in India
is the Punjabi state, and its beliefs are expressed in the Punjabi language.
According to the 1972 Encyclopaedia
Britannica (I suppose this old source is acceptable for a religion that
seems tradition-bound), it is monotheistic, and does away with idols or
religious images. The good life is sought by moral conduct following
commandments and engaging in prayer [EB
1972, vol. 20, p. 506]. (In some ways, we can note, it resembles Christianity
in very broad terms, but it also includes belief in transmigration and
predestination [Funk & Wagnalls New
Encyclopedia, 1972, vol. 21, p. 365].)
Its main holy book is called the
Granth; and there are some initiation
rites for youth, and ritual “usages” such as forms of wearing hair, dress, and
items to carry that are expected of males, though not all Sikh men practice all
of these [EB 1972, vol. 20, pp. 505,
506]. A tradition developed for all men to adopt the use of the name Singh
within their given name (though not every ethnic Indian with the name Singh is
a Sikh) [EB 1972, vol. 20, p. 506]. Women also adopt the middle name Kaur. Sikhism “officially deprecates the [Indian] caste system,” as EB says, but I had long understood that
Sikhs usually took certain types of jobs by tradition, such as
transportation-related jobs. Hence Sikhs’ working at gas stations in the U.S.
today, and Mr. Bhamra working as an airline pilot in this film.
Of course, you need not know all
this stuff in order to enjoy the movie. This cobbled-together set of information—I
hope all of it is fair to the source—I only gathered recently; I didn’t know it
all before seeing the movie all the times I have.
“Go west, young woman”: Jules’s idealizing the U.S. as a true
home for women’s soccer
A short note on one
plot/assumption element of the film that is ironic. While for Americans the
film is a smorgasbord of “cultural artifacts from abroad”—good for a taste of
Sikhism, and some aspects of how Sikhs interrelate with the British, and even
glimpses of various Britishisms like idioms, certain manners, and so on—it is a
little quaint on one aspect of soccer. Jules enthuses over wanting to get a
scholarship to a women’s soccer program in the U.S., which (via use of a
videotape) she wants to Jess to develop enthusiasm for, too. Jules says, “They
have prairie leagues…with stadiums and everything,” or such. Of course, the
world outside the U.S. is
much more a home for soccer fandom and participation than the U.S. is. But
the U.S. does have its women’s soccer program, including Team USA (with its
participation in the Olympics), and certain familiar player names—like Mia
Hamm, New Jersey’s own Christie (Pearce) Rampone, and, among others, a couple
names mentioned in Bend It—Tiffany
Milbrecht [sp?] and Brandi Chastain. This support of a women’s team and
multi-team division is a sort of “exception that proves the rule” where soccer
is concerned in the U.S.
I am not an expert on sports, believe me, but I know enough to say that in the
U.S., soccer is looked as a bit quaint, mainly a high school sport, while where
we let it rise to a higher level than that, it is a women’s sport. (An attempt
by some large entity, which included the P.R.-including use of David Beckham
himself, to start professional men’s soccer in the U.S. hasn’t gotten too, too far, I
think. Info just off the top of my head; see links regarding him I posted above.)
So is it a writing misfire that Bent It has Jules and Jess’s aiming to
get a soccer scholarship in the U.S.?
Actually, this may be a comment on how, even abroad in soccer-valuing
countries, women’s soccer has not really caught on, or been officially or
culturally supported. But also, you could consider that (1) director/writer
Chadha is positing the U.S. as “the land of hope and dreams,” as it has been
for other “goals in life” than soccer, for this own movie’s purposes; but also
(2) this film could be seen as more about female empowerment—a term I dislike
as too “political-buzzword-y” but whose general notion I like—where Jules and
Jess are really exemplars of young women determining their future irrespective
of their traditional settings, and soccer is just an occasion for this.
Correlatively, they see the U.S.
as where they can realize the full flowering of their ambition—as it happens,
in the soccer realm. If this film is autobiographical, as Chadha says it is
(see below), perhaps it is really about her struggle to become a filmmaker,
with soccer just a symbolic stand-in for this career goal. If that is true,
then the U.S.
is really the “field of dreams,” because it would certainly qualify as a top
context for filmmaking.
By the way, speaking of cultural
artifacts, there are plenty of British—for some, you might say
“Commonwealth”—expressions in this film, many of which Americans should understand:
the Commonwealth “Oy!” (not the
Yiddish one) for “Hey!,” bollocks (which
sort of means “bullshit,” but also appears to have a meaning referring to a body part), strop
(slang, I guess, for angry fit, or particularly bad mood), and “Moms” for Mom. There are also certain creative
phrasings such as “a right stroppy cow” or “flipping cow”—cow being a rather derogatory term for certain women (as it
happens, usually used by other women in this context)—so that “right stroppy
cow” translates as “downright angry [or “pissed off”] woman,” and “flipping
cow” is a mild version of “f**king bitch” or the like.
Characters and related plot bits
Perhaps because of English
individualism—such as, maybe, is echoed in Thomas Pynchon’s joke in Mason and Dixon where a talking dog
points out that he is English, and thus “I belong to no one”—it helps to look
at all the actors and their characters, and unpack a bit of how they relate to
the story, and what kind of challenges some may pose for U.S. viewers.
Jesminder Bhamra, or “Jess” (played by Nagra): she is a student
apparently in the equivalent of what in the U.S. is high school; she ends up
passing some kind of exams, and gets a degree (B.L.L.B.?), and this is a good
foundation in her parents’ eyes for now going to medical school. But when given
a chance to play soccer on a local girls’ team, she becomes enamored of doing
that as a career phase (and, as led by Jules, in the U.S.). Nagra has a large scar on
her leg, apparently the result of a burn, and it is worked into the script with
a story she tells her coach Joe, about how she had an accident at a stove and
her clothes caught fire. Her sister doused her with water. The trauma “Put me
off beans and toast [a British dish] for life,” she jokes. Thus an example of
the cultural references, English idioms, and English foods alluded to. Nagra is
usually fine with her pronunciation, and maybe this isn’t a problem for English
audiences, but when she says a key line in the film—“Anyone can cook aloo gobi [a Punjabi dish—potatoes and cauliflower,
cooked with a lot of herbs and spices], but
who can bend a ball [kick it in a curved vector] like Beckham?”—she chatters the line out, and you (a goofy Yank
like me) have to be quick to make it out. Beckham, of course, is David Beckham,
the British superstar soccer player (see the links several paragraphs above).
Juliette Paxton, or “Jules” (Knightley): a local (West
London, I think) student and intramural soccer player, the
apparent star of the Harriers. Knightley was about 16 when she performed this
role, and thus she fits it well. She has a pretty face, movie-star-ready;
manners-wise, she is girlish in ways, and articulate and poised in other ways;
she can alternate between confident and pouty as suits the youth of the
character, and happens to make her a little less attractive maturity-wise than
Jess. Knightly appears here as thin and bony as a cheap fish dish (I’ve wanted
to use that line for months, but not out of meanness). Her almost-flat chest
suits the avid athleticism of Jules. Still, when she’s tarted up for “clubbing”
on a night after the team has been playing in Germany, she wears a loose blouse
that looks like tinfoil, and her face is made up sexily. When she mixes it up
on the dance floor—you know, “shake your groove thang,” slinky motion with back
to the camera—she is less tomboyish and looks a little more like the future
“force to be reckoned with” that today’s young female stars seem usually pegged
to be (whether along pointedly sexually attractive lines or not). The one thing
that seems a little off with Knightley in her acting through this film is her
flashing her teeth, with her lowers showing. I guess she’s toned that down
since then.
Mohaan Singh Bhamra, Jess’s father, played by Anupam Kher, a veteran of hundreds of Indian movies,
according to his Wikipedia page. An airline pilot, religiously inclined enough
always to be in turban (Kher in normal life doesn’t wear one), he has his two
daughters’ interest at heart, and is quite conservative. Kher plays him rather
understatedly but with crispness and authority. Turns out Mr. Bharma had played
soccer as a youth in Kenya,
and had distinguished himself; when he arrived in Britain, he wasn’t allowed to play
and his turban was made fun of. Early on, he doesn’t want Jess to suffer the
same disappointment and humiliation. Later, he relents.
Suki Bhamra, Jess’s mother (played by Shaheen Khan). She most consistently, of the family, presses
home parental disapproval of Jess’s straying from her conservative
intentions/wishes for Jess. Wants Jess to learn domestic duties (cooking—such
as “full Punjabi dinner,” and cleaning), but also to get her education and have
a fairly standard career. One funny exchange has her cite an example that she
wants Jess to heed as a negative—a niece who ran off and wore short skirts.
Jess: She became a fashion designer. Mother retorts: She’s divorced. You need
to listen during this dense film to appreciate little fun observations like that.
Pinky, Jess’s sister (Archie Panjabi). A spicy performance of an amusing enough character, but in
a way hers is the most disappointing for me. Pinky’s main subplot, which
affects a lot of the overall story, concerns her being engaged to Teetu
[spelling according to the film's Wikipedia article], a Sikh man she took up with on her own without her family
prearranging a marriage—contrary to usual Sikh practice. The engagement stands,
with wedding expected, until Teetu’s mother, a rather pretentious sort, spies
Jess and Jules talking together at a bus stop, and the woman thinks they were
Jess and an English boy kissing. Teetu’s mother calls off the wedding plans,
thinking the Jess incident reflects badly on the Bhamra family. (How realistic
this sort of thing is within Sikh circles, I’m not sure.) Pinky, who has
protected Jess in her secretly pursued soccer efforts, is deeply disappointed
and exposes to their parents Jess’s soccer activities. Suki bemoans “two
deceiving daughters.” Later, Teetu’s parents seek a rapprochement with the
Bhamras, and the wedding is back on.
Pinky is a lively character, but
verbally Panjabi sometimes is hard to follow—there are some lines of hers I still can’t make out, after all my
viewings. Also, some of her lines feature an apparent British way of inserting
an interjection on the end of a remark, all quickly delivered—so it sounds like
what might be more fun on the page makes for less-easy aural apprehension: “You
make sure it doesn’t, all right!” or “You take care, right! Laters!”—the plural
“Laters” apparently being a slang way of saying “Bye” to several people at
once (though it's also used for single people, so who knows why the s is added). Pinky also proves to insert some family disapproval in Jess’s life when
she questions Jess’s romantic interest in her coach Joe—Pinky asks whether she
wants to be the “one everyone stares at” because she took up with an English
fellow.
Joe (Rhys Meyers) coaches the Hounslow Harriers because he could no
longer perform in a men’s team. References to his difficult relationship with
his father—I’ll come back to this—add to the thematic and subplot complexity of
this film. He works in a bar as a kind of low-level manager (he does
bookkeeping, for one thing). He pulls out another “card of past personal
travails” when Jess explains her explosive reaction to a racist taunt in one
game—an English player on the opposite team calls her a “Paki”—and Jess,
already having been called down in strong terms by Joe, following a ref’s
throwing her off the field, seeks his understanding. It turns out, Joe has
suffered discrimination too, because he is Irish. (Not related, earlier, Jules has
told Jess that some of the team girls feel Joe is too strict.)
Mel (Shaznay Lewis) is one of the few Black regular characters in the film; she is the team
captain, and occasionally steps in to do managerial things like lead exercises.
Lewis, with British accent, is a pop star (of rap and such music) in Britain; this was
her first acting role, according to a DVD extra. She is sufficient in the role
as an understated character—while, not emanating from her character, one of her songs turns up on the soundtrack; but she seems curiously not
terribly fleshed out. She adds some girly touches such as one scene showing her
brandishing a tampon in a locker room.
Paula Paxton, Jules’s mother (Juliet Stevenson), provides some comic relief. Willing to play a droll
horseface with occasional chirpy, goofy comedy, Stevenson presents Paula as almost
a counterpart to Jess’s mother, not entirely warm to her daughter’s becoming a
soccer star. Paula wants Jules to be more girly (including clothes that fake
having breasts), and to prepare her for standard middle-class life, such as
planning for marriage and getting a job as a teacher (following one example she
cites from a women’s athletics magazine, Lees
I think it’s called). This mother is thrown for a loop when she starts
suspecting that Jess and Jules are having a lesbian affair (the dread sexual inclination
mostly coming from Jess, she would seem to assume). This seems a stupid
development, but it is handled lightly and doesn’t go on too long, adding some
comic fun that ultimately isn’t too offensive.
Alan Paxton, Jules’s father (Frank Harper) is Jules’s dad, who takes a lot more favorable view of her
soccer aspirations than her mom does. An equable, somewhat doughy fellow, he
provides a calm, sane counterweight to his somewhat more flighty/uptight wife.
Tony, Jess’s male friend (played by Ameet Chana), is a fairly frequent
presence in the film, representing Jess’s school community—they both take a
biology class, and compare how they dealt with a genetics problem in an early
scene. Turns out he is a homosexual, after Jess has been persuaded (or temporarily
goaded) into seeking a new candidate for a mate by Pinky; in a somewhat
farcical scene, she tries to see if they can be boyfriend-and-girlfriend, and
Tony sanely queries what this is about. He shortly reveals that he is
homosexual, including having a thing for David Beckham, the one-and-only
himself.
There are three young Sikh women friends, who seem like secularly styled
princesses. Pinky talks to them in a store early in the film, and later they
appear in a park and talk to Jess. They seem to reflect what older Sikhs might
lament: acculturation of the youth to Western morés.
Who helmed the film, especially director Chadha
As you can see, there are quite
a few colorful characters, made even more “tricky” to interpret at times with
their Britishisms. But the whole story comes off fairly nicely, due in good
part to director Gurinder Chadha, born in 1960. Actor Anupam Kher remarks in a DVD interview that Chadha
has the “discipline” of a Westerner but the “heart” of an Indian.
Chadha says (in her own
interview) that this film (of the numerous she had made to that point) was her
“most autobiographical,” and indeed it’s dedicated to her late father. Chadha,
a Sikh, sought to depict the cultural tensions and interplays, as well as a
story of female self-empowerment, that shape the film’s central spirit that
carries us through it.
Writers, producers, DP.
Chadha is one of three writers for the film; and she is among its producers.
Indeed, there is a large set of cobbled-together producing entities for this
film; I won’t begin to try to piece them out, because it’s hard enough for me
to interpret (whenever I do it as an amateur) producing and distribution
arrangements for American films.
Adding to the international character of this production, the director of
photography is Jong Lin.
Cinematography style. The
photography makes use of a number of tricks, including a Steadicam held down
low to the ground to follow ball movement and such; an apparent wide-angle lens
for those shots that feature several characters at once. The film uses
multi-person shots a lot. Editing is often quick, but on occasion a shot is
allowed to play long to have just about all the action come out in that single
shot. This directorial variety adds to the energy of the film.
Music. There is very little usual composed “underscore” for the film (among the exceptions is when Jess and Joe
are hugging after the “Paki” incident). Almost all the music is various
snippets of pop songs (British, Indian, other), adding spice to short scenes.
Sometimes the music seems of odd taste for a given scene, but almost always it
still adds excitement. One odd choice is “She’s a Lady,” apparently written by
Paul Anka, but as I remember recorded in a macho version by Tom Jones about 40
years ago. The version here is recorded by an apparent Black artist, with heavy
percussion; the snippet of it is fun to hear, but it doesn’t seem quite as
“women-centered” in its lyrics (the whole song, that is) as seems intended in
its use here.
A song (by Melanie Chisholm, or Melanie C as her stage name is, formerly one of the Spice Girls; maybe I'm wrong), “Independence Day,” is used to good effect. On the other hand, a reference to George Michael and Wham! in one
place in the story may go over young Americans’ heads.
A crux-type moment rendered well by Nagra: Keeping true to a career
love, based in part on key self-respect
There is a good point where
Jess—after so many twists and turns in her odyssey to remain with her soccer
sideline—talks with Joe at his workplace, and reveals that she won’t be able to
come to the “final” game of the team when the American scout will be there,
because she has to partake in her sister Pinky’s on/off/on wedding. With her
eyes tearing a bit, but her delivery nicely composed/stoic, she and Joe have a
heart-to-heart conversation (he gets a bit teary, too, it seems), and Joe tries
to persuade her to stick to her heart’s calling, the game, referring to her
family’s conservative demands: “If you always try to please them, you’ll end up
blaming them.”
At some point, Jess points out
to Joe that his father—despite Joe’s reminders of how difficult his father had
been—would be proud of how Joe hadn’t given up on soccer, to the extent of
coaching the girls’ team. Paralleling this reference to his right to be proud
of not giving up, Joe returns: “Then why are you giving up?”
It isn’t so easy for Jess. She
keeps her head low, and dresses up in sari and whatever else for her sister’s
wedding. But it is her father who finally takes her aside and allows her to
sneak off to the final game, because she looks like she’s “at her father’s
funeral.” Her father had let himself be disappointed in discontinuing his
soccer aspirations in the face of English discouragement; he doesn’t want Jess
to suffer the same thing. He allows Jess to go, with loyal Tony driving her
hurriedly.
Jess, fouled in the game, is
allowed to kick what I guess is the equivalent of a foul-triggered field-goal
attempt such as you see in American football. A standing lineup of girls—which
she briefly “hallucinates” as Indian women from the wedding—is there running
interference. But Jess “bends the ball like Beckham” around them and scores an
apparently winning goal. Then, it’s back to the wedding.
Near the end of the film, Jess’s
being honest with her parents about what she wants to do—focus on soccer as her
present career: this brings home the central theme: being honest with oneself, based ultimately on respecting oneself—this is a good lesson to and from a young woman, whether she’s a black-haired young woman
of Indian extraction or a pretty blonde woman of Irish extraction. She goes
from “everyone’s girl” to “her own woman,” and with her self-respect as the central footing for this, the very
next step is committed-to respect for
others.
