By Trish Audette
With the arrival of Bend It Like Beckham in video stores this month and Mambo Italiano in theatres across the country this fall, a genre of new ethnic movies only appears to be gaining more popularity — and scoring big box office dollars.
New ethnic movies follow a fairy tale pattern for second- and third-generation immigrants to North America and Western Europe.
The films play on the conflict experienced by young people of various ethnicity — the pull of responsibility to the traditional family structure versus the pull of the New World and its constantly changing social values.
Bend It Like Beckham (directed by Gurinder Chadra) is the tale of an Indian girl who would rather play soccer — er, football — in the fields of London than learn to cook a traditional meal at home with her mother. Alternatively, Mambo Italiano (based on Steve Galluccio’s play) is a comedy set in Montreal about two young Italian men learning to deal with their sexualities and their families.
What makes these stories new, however — aside from their light-touch handling of complex diaspora issues — is they are being made by minority writers, directors, producers and actors.
So when the age-old stereotypes of the various ethnic groups come into play, they’re being played up by people who have been stereotyped and who have decided to embrace it as funny instead of hurtful.
The genre isn’t new, but began appealing to a wider audience in 2002 with the release of Nia Vardalos’s blockbuster My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Vardalos wrote My Big Fat Greek Wedding as a near-autobiography. It’s the story of an unmarried 30-year-old woman still living at home with her Greek parents who seeks economic and educational independence, enabling her to find the love of her life in a non-Greek package.
Despite the rampant use of stereotypes in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the film appears to have struck a chord with North American audiences.
Domenico Pietropaolo, an Italian studies and drama professor at the University of Toronto, says this is because comedy is usually based on stereotypes.
“To laugh is to laugh at others,” he says.
He adds that humour — and stereotypes — can be misused because it plays on a sense of superiority.
“In comedy, you always sympathize with the victimizer.’
But Pietropaolo says the new ethnic movies are about how social values are changing for second- and third-generation immigrants. The humour comes from the different world views of children and their parents.
Children of the new generation, who grew up in North America, are trying to find their places in a society where there are no longer clear lines delineating, for example, who can date who or whether soccer fields are reserved for men and kitchens for women.
Their parents, on the other hand, continue to acclimatize to the new society by clinging to traditions in order to retain a sense of cultural identity.
The reason these new — softer, lighter — ethnic movies rarely raise the ire of various groups is in part because they are a reflection of heritage, not dictated by an outside group but by a community itself. Unlike, for example, the HBO series The Sopranos, which is criticized by the Italian community for playing up the negative stereotype of Italians as organized crime lords — written, directed and produced by a man named David Chase.
“They’re laughing at themselves,” says Karim Karim, an associate professor of mass communication at Carleton University.
He points to the 2002 Canadian film Bollywood/Hollywood (the Toronto-based story of an Indian man pressured by his family to find a nice Indian wife) as an example of this. Bollywood/Hollywood doesn’t just play on stereotypes — it employs many of the traditional tools of Indian film-making, including random scenes of all the characters breaking into song.
Ultimately, playing around with stereotypes, although tricky, can be done with humour and sensitivity, Karim says.
“It’s all a matter of how well a person has immersed herself or himself in that culture.”
Karim says when a second- or third-generation immigrant sees a positive film made about his or her heritage, it can cause them to become introspective about their cultural identity.
The generational shift appears to be making all the comedic difference, maybe even helping immigrants find a sense of identity amid the humour and even the stereotyping.