(15) (1hr 57 mins)
Starring: Steve Evets, Eric Cantona, Stephanie Bishop
Director: Ken Loach
Star rating: *****
IT didn’t win any prizes but the much-admired Looking For Eric was the talk of last month’s Cannes Film Festival.
And it deserves to have been on people’s lips; the film is an absolute joy, a well- paced journey through comedy, romance, hopelessness and despair – with some moments of football genius thrown in to remind ourselves of a man whose name Manchester United fans still chant a dozen years after his retirement.
The plot is as raw as any Ken Loach work; Eric Bishop is in his early fifties, looking back on the last 30 years with increasing regret and frustration. As scriptwriter Paul Laverty says: “Eric the postman is slipping through his own fingers.”
His wife has gone, his stepsons are out of control, the house is full of their hoisted televisions, and even a cement mixer has “walked” into the front garden.
He is heading towards the brink, driven by an inability to face up to why he abandoned his first wife and daughter so many years before.
Despite the comical efforts and misplaced goodwill of his workmates, Eric continues to sink and in desperation he turns to the poster on his bedroom wall for advice – to his hero, footballing genius and philosopher Eric Cantona.
The real Cantona appears and gradually drags him back from the edge in some superbly funny and poignant sequences.
Cantona, ever grandiose and vain, continually punctures his own pomposity in delightful style with some first-rate, self- deprecating put-downs.
“People forget you’re just a man,” says Eric the postman. The other Eric stiffens and puffs out his chest. “I am not a man,” he says. “I am Cantona.”
Of course, the first question people ask is “What’s he like as an actor?”
The truth is, it’s difficult to say because Ken Loach films are constructed from initial casting to final editing in such a way that actors never ever look like they’re following a script or instructions from an off-shot director’s chair; they come complete with all the awkwardness and inelegance that projects them as real people, people you know and people you understand.
There is such beauty in that alone.
Cantona’s final act of perceived pretension comes in the final scrolling credits – Eric Bishop: Steve Evets; Eric Cantona: Lui-même.
At the beginning, something like that would appear ostentatious, but as the audience files out, it’s viewed very much tongue in cheek.
It’s essentially an acutely funny and moving story where damaged humanity eventually responds to Gallic advice as oblique as: “He who is afraid to throw the dice will never throw a six.” Priceless.