Looking for Eric

I rather doubt that director Ken Loach has much truck with all that computerised mucking about anyway.

Because this is very definitely a Ken Loach film. There’s the kitchen-sink realism of Carla’s Song or My Name Is Joe and the unflinching script of The Wind That Shakes The Barley, as we meet Eric Bishop (Steve Evets). He’s a Mancunian postie with at least one failed marriage behind him, struggling to raise two lippy teenage lads.

And he’s sailing, repeatedly, round a roundabout. The wrong way. Just about escaping with his life, Eric teeters on the edge of a nervous breakdown, which is where this tale lifts into unexpected territory. Because Eric’s hero, ‘Big’ Eric Cantona, shows up and starts dispensing philosophical guidance. Much of it in French.

Famed for strutting his stuff at Old Trafford’s Theatre of Dreams at in the early 90s, Cantona has shimmied from sports-field to screen (with a little detour to play international beach football along the way). But is he fantastique, or... that other French word that most of us didn’t learn in a classroom?

It’s the first one. The presence and charisma that commanded crowds of 70,000 remains very evident, but there’s a self-deprecating quality to Cantona’s lines and his performance that threads right through this remarkable movie.

Looking For Eric is at once funny and sad, uplifting and heart-breaking, brutally real and modern-day fable. And at the hub of all this is Eric Bishop – his relationships with his sons, with his daughter, with his mates, and with his childhood sweetheart.

It’s a romance, it’s about second chances, it’s a buddy movie, and it’s about friends backing each other up. And, through the eyes of Eric Bishop and his Man United mad mates, football fan Loach makes sure there are some memories of the Cantona glory days in here too.

Evets is superb in the lead role, carrying the emotional weight of the film and forging a quite brilliant dynamic with Big Eric – loaded with comedy, often touching, occasionally profound.

It’s a surprising journey that never goes quite where you think it will. There are some big laughs, and not a few tears. And for anyone who’s spent many years thinking of Cantona as a bit of un coq, this might just cast him in a different light.