Games people play: 'Laurel Canyon' & "Bend It Like Beckham'. (Screen).

What's the best way of rebelling against your parents when they happen to belong to a minority? By joining the majority, of course. Consider two new movies that show what happens when a whelp from an enclave merges with the masses.

Laurel Canyon is the name and setting of Lisa Cholodenko's second feature (I missed her first, the much-praised High Art). Helicopter shots sprinkled throughout the action keep reminding us that the locale, scooped out of rolling hillsides, is a bit of Californian paradise bordering on hell--an L.A. freeway. So the canyon provides an oasis from hurly burly? Not for the people inside the house where Cholodenko takes us. They include British and American rock musicians making a CD under the earth-mothering supervision of the house's owner, Jane, a fortyish, bisexual record producer dedicated to hard work, hard loving, and hard partying. Also, Jane's son, Sam, and his fiancee, Alex, who were promised the house as a waystation between Harvard Medical School and the launching of their careers. The CD refuses to gel, the musicians won't move out until it does, so...welcome to the spare bedroom on the second floor, kids, and please don't mind the electric guitars wailing twelve hours a day and the fact that we party till dawn in the swimming pool just below your windows, even though Sam has to get up at 5:30 a.m. to hie himself to the psychiatric ward where he is interning.

"She's always been like this," snarls Sam. The rockers may be potheads and orgiasts but Sam is the real rebel of the movie. Against Mom. Against Mom's bohemia. Against disorder, laxness, neurosis, squalor, and everything else Mom stands for in Sam's mind. So it's off to the hospital every morning to learn how to heal shattered psyches, but back every night to a bedroom throbbed by rock music, scented by the aroma of marijuana, and invaded by the noises of his mother having rough sex with lead singer Ian at the other end of the corridor. As if all that weren't enough, Sam at work keeps noticing the luminescent eyes and high cheekbones of the beautiful second-year intern from Israel, while Alex, left behind in Laurel Canyon to type her Ph.D. thesis on the sex life of fruitflies, soon finds herself drawn to the sex life of rock 'n' rollers. In fact, an orgy a trois with Ian and her own prospective mother-in-law seems to be in the offing for the bride-to-be. Poor Sam.

Conformists mewed with bohemians. Refinement besieged by the raffish. Aren't we talking about screwball comedy here? And doesn't Alex distracted from her fruit flies, call to mind the lab-coated, bespectacled Cary Grant of Bringing Up Baby, distracted from his dinosaur bones by the lovelier bones of Kate Hepburn?

Alas, the resemblance never entered Cholodenko's mind. Laurel Canyon has its genial moments and is never as solemn as its betrothed academics, but it belongs to the same genre being currently traversed by 90 percent of today's American Indie filmmakers and by many foreign artists as well: psychodrama.

Either on stage or on screen, a psychodrama's plot exists mainly to provide an excuse for five or six scenes in which characters sit on couches, around kitchen tables, or in restaurant booths, staring into one another's eyes, while whispering, muttering, screaming or flatly stating home truths. Everything hinges on who did what to whom and who is to blame for the speaker's emotional pain. The past is dredged up, summed up, poked at, denied, admitted, spat out, sighed over, forgiven, digested, surmounted. Secrets and Lies, Jungle Fever, Magnolia, Interiors, and all of John Cassavetes's films except Gloria, are film examples of psychodrama. Stage examples are legion, notably the greatest American play of them all, Long Day's Journey into Night, so obviously I intend no sweeping indictment. Even if it seems more influenced by Arthur (Primal Scream) Janov than Ibsen or D. W. Griffith, psychodrama is indeed drama since it comprises conflict, confrontations, climaxes, and resolutions. However, the defects of the genre glare. There is very little pleasure in storytelling qua storytelling. Since all the power of psychodrama resides in the human face and voice, the physical world is scanted and this limits the visual aspects of the moviemaking. Worst of all, the characters tend to be scab-scratching crybabies instead of interesting strivers toward compelling goals.

All this is true of Laurel Canyon. Its storytelling is perfunctory, since the initial setup is factitious (Jane, a well-connected show-biz artist/businesswoman really couldn't find a friend with whom to board the youngsters?) and the plot wends its weary, meandering way to the predestined orgy confrontation. The direction and cinematography make us feel vividly the itchy claustrophobia of the fiancees trapped in their bedroom, but we never get a solid sense of the entire house, the surrounding countryside, or the ugliness of the freeway. There is no feeling for the details or atmosphere of work, neither the way a psychiatric ward functions nor the way a rock band creates.

In its characterizations, the movie is at its worst and at its best. The acting is good. As Jane, Frances McDormand serves up her usual odd blend of goofiness, maternal warmth, and sexiness, an ideal combination for this particular character. Calling on his own specialty, turbulence concealed by blandness, Christian Bale makes Sam a normal guy manque. Kate Beckinsale can't overcome the incoherence of Alex as written (see below) but she's both a good actress and eye candy. Alessandro Nivola mines Ian for all the skuzzy humor the character contains.

Yet the characterizations--as written--also reveal the movie's one-sidedness and lack of eloquence. While Jane and Ian are consistently and humorously sketched (their actions springing logically from their psychology and their milieu), Alex and Sam are mere concoctions. They need to be in a screwball comedy, since they are from the very beginning the sort of fuddy-duddies Gail Patrick and Ralph Bellamy repeatedly played in the 1930s. True, once she gets past the first two reels, Cholodenko tries to provoke our sympathy for the pair and to give them depth. Tries and fails. When Sam recalls the high school teacher who straightened him out and gave him the ambition to succeed in conventional society, his monologue is so cloudily written that we never get a vivid picture of the father figure. The writer/director simply can't get into the mind of this escapee from bohemia. When Jane probes Alex for her reaction to a song being recorded, this gorgeous, wealthy, academically triumphant nymph behaves with all the elan of a squashed cabbage. Why? Because the rockers she's talking to are sexually raffish and she's prim? How prim does Cholodenko think rich beauties are? Does she even understand the class into which Alex was born? When Alex calls her father a puritan and then defines a puritan as someone "who reads Proust and wears tweeds," we know we're dealing with a writer who lacks social acumen. Rich puritans may wear tweeds but they do not read the author of Sodome et Gomorrhe. House of the Seven Gables, maybe.

I am a clueless idiot, or, in deference to the movie I'm about to recommend, a gormless mug. Having spent most of my column on the spineless Laurel Canyon, I have little space left to do anything for the exhilarating Bend It Like Beckham, except rave about it. So here are a few blurbs:

MAGNIFICENT MULTICULTURAL FUN! Gurinder Chadha's film deals with an Indian-Brit girl's desire to play soccer in defiance of her parents' wish to have her behave like a proper Indian maiden suitable for the marriage market. Trouble is, the family and its entire clan have already been transformed by British urban life in West London. At a supposedly traditional Indian feast, a cell phone rings and everybody, including the sari-clad grandmothers, dives into pockets and purses.

A FAMILY FLICK THAT OUTDOES DISNEY!! In outline, this bustling little masterpiece resembles one of those movies made for the Disney Channel. Teenaged Jess struggles with her parents until they see she must Be Herself. Jess and her best friend clash over a hunky coach until friendship and soccer make both girls rise above it. Blah, blah, blah. But this corny pie crust has the most delicious filling: wonderfully rude dialogue that snaps and glistens; acting, by Parmindeer Nagra (as Jess) and a large cast unknown to me (except for the reliable Juliet Stevenson), that makes the characters as familiar as old friends, yet still capable of surprising you; editing subliminally fast in the sport sequences but attentive in the intimate scenes; photography that never candycoats the grim English weather but discovers the real beauty latent in homeliness. Disney-like in sweetness, yes, but in its earthy texture and liberating insolence, this movie has a real kinship with Joan Littlewood's almost forgotten Sparrows Can't Sing (1962) and early Richard Lester (A Hard Day's Night, The Knack).

SEE THIS MOVIE!!! or you'll never know why the line, "Get your lesbian feet out of my shoes" is, in context, one of the most hilarious sentences ever uttered in the annals of recorded comedy, or why a movie that contains such a line is nevertheless suitable for the entire family.