Ken Loach’s new film swaps trade unions and the Spanish civil war for… Eric Cantona?

PARIS—“I have a lot of good moments, but the one I prefer is when I kicked the hooligan.”

That famous quote, no doubt delivered in his heavily accented English, perfectly encapsulates the career of Eric Cantona, one of the greatest footballers to ever take to the pitch. His resume, which spans the late 80s and early 90s, first in France and then in England, includes a lot of incredible goals and passes; a talent for bizarre philosophy and notable quotations; and a maniacal propensity for violence and idiocy, both on and off the pitch.

Yes, he really did drop kick that hooligan, while in the employ of Manchester United, leaping into the stands karate-style after he’d been sent off for kicking a Crystal Palace opponent who’d tugged on his jersey.

(Other famous and true Cantonisms: punching a team-mate in the face; hurling his boots into a team-mate’s face; throwing a ball at a referee; at the subsequent disciplinary hearing, where he was banned for one month, responding by walking up to every member of the hearing committee and calling each one an “idiot,” after which his suspension was extended to three months, directly precipitating his first retirement from professional football at the age of 25; moving to England to restart his career on the advice of his psychoanalyst; spitting on a fan; and being dropped from the French national team for calling team manager Henri Michel a “sack of shit” in a TV interview)

The Paris-born, Marseille-raised Cantona is an even bigger legend in England, and especially in Manchester, where they call him “King Eric” and “Jesus,” in spite of the fact that he’s French. And so it’s no surprise that an English director has finally made a movie about Cantona, really. But the surprising part of Ken Loach’s new film, Looking For Eric, which screened in competition at last month’s Cannes Film Festival and opened in France last week, is that the sport’s most famous loose-cannon plays the sage life coach who helps a down-and-out postal worker get his groove back.

That last phrase actually came to mind several times when I caught a matinee screening of the film at the MK2 Beaubourg theatre this week. The movie is sort of a “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” for the punter set, although Cantona never actually has sex with the postal worker (whose name is also Eric). That’s how Stella ended up getting her groove back, isn’t it? I would look it up, but I’m at the public library right now, and if I type “Stella sex groove” into Google I fear for what sorts of results my search will return. Best to think of the children, and just go on assumption.

In the British, all-male remake, Steve Evets plays Eric Bishop, a Mancunian postal worker with two ex-wives, two deadbeat stepsons sharing his filthy townhouse, and a swiftly declining will-to-live. It’s all going pretty badly for Eric, who tries to kill himself by driving the wrong way around an English traffic circle (I’m sure Cantona did that once or twice in his day). Things look pretty bleak until the Sad Eric hits rock bottom and steals some of his son’s hash and gets stoned alone in his bedroom, a middle-aged-man shrine to his hero, Eric-Cantona-King-Eric-The-Greatest-Football-Player-Who-Ever-Lived.

And then Cantona shows up in his bedroom, like Stella’s boy-toy, ready to shock a bewildered Sad Eric back into his groove. “Say something in a French accent, so I know you’re really him,” says Bishop.

(Let that be a lesson to all you kids out there: don’t smoke pot. Because if you do, your sports hero will magically start hanging out with you all the time, helping you to overcome your crippling depression and telling you great stories about what it was like to score the winning goal in the 1996 FA Cup final against Liverpool.)

“That’s the thing about Cantona: you have to take the good with the incomprehensible.”Cantona is no stranger to the screen, having acted fairly extensively in French cinema since his second retirement from football in 1997. But playing himself, or rather a bizarre caricature of himself, he’s magic, whispering cryptic motivational maxims to Bishop in a mixture of French and English: “If you don’t’ roll the dice, you will never get a six,” and, “le plus noble des vengeances est de pardoner.” And of course, King Eric does get Other Eric back on track, though not without a turn into some unexpectedly dark territory (Loach, after all, is the director of the 2006 Palme d’Or winning “The Wind That Shakes The Barley,” about the IRA revolution in Ireland).

The heavy tone of the film’s third act often seems a little incongruous when you think back to the picture’s best scenes, those throwaway bits of Miserable Eric puffing on spliffs – why would he stop if he gets to hang out with Eric Cantona? – quizzing his new imaginary best friend on his greatest footballing memories. The stock footage of Cantona, sporting his trademark popped collar, finishing off some classic goals for Man United is a sports-loving moviegoer’s dream, as are Cantona’s halting, tossed-off responses: “My greatest moment, in fact, was not a goal. It was a pass … every game, I try to offer the people a gift. Sometimes it doesn’t work.”

And when Looking For Eric manages to steer clear of the guns-and-gangs drama, it also takes on some elemental themes of sports fandom – the ludicrous climactic scene, with three busloads of loyal Man U ultras sporting Nixon-style plastic Cantona masks (Bishop’s best friends are named Spleen and Meatballs, which tells you what strata of society we’re dealing with here), presents a sporting solution to a seemingly insurmountable conflict.

Ultimately, the film is clever and amusing but a bit schizophrenic in tone, which I’m assuming is why it ended up ranking just below the top Cannes films in Screen International’s jury ratings, but was never in serious contention for any of the top awards. It’s largely good fun, but often feels misdirected. That’s the thing about Cantona: you have to take the good with the incomprehensible, and even when you have no idea what he’s going on about, as Bishop sometimes does (“Don’t you start yammering on about seagulls, I don’t want to hear it”), you’re still awfully glad he’s around.

After all, where would we be without the man who delivered one of the most famous abbreviated press conferences in sports history, after the kick that leveled a hooligan?

“When the seagulls follow a trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea. Thank you very much.” [Exits]