Looking For Eric Review

Grim reality these days is evidently a little too grim and real. First Mike Leigh delivered his cheerful tribute to looking on the bright side, Happy-Go-Lucky. Now Britain's other great social-realist Ken Loach has turned in an unexpectedly mischievous comedy-drama about searching for the hero inside. Looking For Eric is Loach's most accessible film for years and the most playful of his entire career, but the director has sacrificed none of the values we traditionally associate with A Ken Loach Film. Written by Loach's long-time collaborator Paul Laverty but inspired by Cantona himself, between them Red Ken and Eric The Red chip Loach's socially-aware storytelling into a fantastical league of their own.

Divorced Manchester postman Eric (Steve Evets) is struggling with two errant teenage stepsons whose principle passions are computer games, porn and weed. Depressed, lonely and knocked out of shape by a car accident, Eric's lost control of the ball. Skinning up a late night spliff, he sparks up an imaginary conversation with his idol, Manchester United's genius forward Eric Cantona. As if by magic Cantona materialises in Eric's bedroom and begins dispensing some of that gnomic, Canton-ese wisdom - advice which the real Eric hopes might help him win back his first wife Lily (Stephanie Bishop), whom he abandoned with a baby 20 years ago and who now won't have anything to do with him.

Though Loach's films have rarely been noted for their broad humour, writer Laverty has always sprinkled them with a steady supply of wit. Looking For Eric's first half-hour comes loaded with dry, daft, laugh-out-loud comedy, much of it led by Eric's mate Meatballs ('Early Doors' star John Henshaw) whose bulk and ballast prevent Eric - and eventually the film - from losing the plot completely.

That opening comic salvo is followed by the potentially awkward arrival of a gangster sub-plot centred round Eric's son Ryan (Gerard Kearns). It's at this point that Cantona is relegated to the background and the comedy consigned to the bench as Loach pitches honest graft against easy money, and criminal individualism against community spirit. The agenda is shamelessly unsubtle, and some of the film's colour is drained as Loach gives in to dogmatic black and white. All of which pales against an extraordinary finale in which British cinema's most dedicated leftie taps the unexplored - and possibly unimagined - potential of the feelgood vigilante film.

It was the French philosopher (and Algerian goalkeeper) Albert Camus who insisted that everything he knew about morality he'd learned from football. Cantona clearly agrees. The revelation that his greatest moment on the pitch wasn't one of those spectacular goals but a cunningly judged little pass is designed to teach Eric the value of team spirit. Cantona's own delightfully vague aphorisms ("Wizout danger we cannot get beyond danger") dance nimbly along the line between self-mockery and self-mythology. "I am not a man," he tells Eric at one point. "I am... Can-tona." Then 'Eric Cantona' flashes a wry little smirk and blows out the 'Marseillaise' very badly on a trumpet. Unlikely though it is that anyone ever thought they'd say this about a Ken Loach film, for the 116 minutes of Looking For Eric's duration it makes Manchester United's Gallic enigma look like the coolest man on the planet.

Though it was Cantona who grabbed the headlines when the film showed at Cannes, its real star is scrawny, grizzled, 48-year-old jobbing actor Steve Evets, whose CV includes a batch of low-key TV appearances and a brief stint in Mark E Smith's skiffle-punk legends The Fall. Evets pitches Eric as an amiable, downtrodden, slightly spaced-out loser, but with his private version of Cantona guiding him towards his goal - getting back with Lily - he locates a very Loachian purpose and self-determination. There's a sense in which Looking For Eric feels like a mash-up of three distinct stories, any one of which might have been mined more deeply. But Evets is brilliantly cast as the film's binding agent. Funny, poignant, humble and vulnerable - this is a performance as uniquely eloquent as Eric's own endlessly repeated "Ferfooksache."

Loach, 73 years old at the time of this, almost his fortieth film release, has never paid much attention to critical consensus. His has been a form of filmmaking that takes place outside the gate and under the wire - that's why we value his partisan, personal but passionate approach to storytelling. Ironically, that dogged determination to do it his way may provide him with his biggest hit since Kes in 1969. Slightly bizarre - dramatically and ideologically - though the film's conclusion is, it's hard to resist Looking For Eric's sense of fun, or the carefully cooked up inspirational fantasy which suggests that the spirit of Eric Cantona - whatever the hell that might actually be - is always hovering outside the penalty box, waiting to help you knock one in.