Looking for Eric (15)

Alison Rowat's Review

A funny thing happened during the screening of Ken Loach’s Looking for Eric - I laughed out loud. While hardly unheard of for humour to feature in the work of the Palme d’Or winner, the wit is usually grimmer than a wet fortnight in North Korea.

Glasgow audiences especially could be forgiven for thinking that if the Samaritans were to do anything as frivolous as funding films, the director of Sweet Sixteen and My Name is Joe would be their Spielberg.

To be sure, Looking for Eric, the tale of a Manchester United-obsessed postman whose life has been blighted by depression, poverty, and poverty of expectation, is a long way from Julie Andrews running up the hillside.

Yet Loach and his Scots screenwriting partner Paul Laverty manage to fashion from what could be tragic material a warm, uplifting picture with a heart as big as Ronaldo’s pay packet.

Besides the talents of Loach, Laverty and Steve Evets, who plays Eric Bishop, the postie in crisis, the film has Eric Cantona to thank for that.

The striker turned actor plays a blinder as a life coach who magically appears to Bishop in a puff of cannabis smoke. Who better, the mail man observes, than a flawed genius to counsel a flawed postman. Indeed.

Bishop, in common with many a Loachian figure, doesn’t have his troubles to seek. They’re lined up outside the door of his ramshackle terraced house along with various bits of tat.

Left to bring up two stepsons alone after a failed second marriage, Bishop comes home after a day’s work to dirty dishes, overflowing ashtrays and a house full of unemployed lads watching television. This is one life he’d definitely like to return to sender.

More stress is coming his way. Bishop’s daughter from his first marriage needs more help with her baby as her final exams near, a development that will involve the childminding grandad coming back into contact with his first wife, and great love, Lily.

As he tells Cantona the counsellor, nothing was ever right after he walked out on Lily all those years ago. He cannot handle the thought of seeing her again, and reawakening old feelings of guilt, yet he must.

Evets, so impressive opposite Robert Carlyle in Summer, excels as the downbeat Mancunian carrying around his own personal raincloud. Wiry, dishevelled, and downcast, but with obvious intelligence burning between his ears, he’s another of Loach and Laverty’s working class heroes, a man battered by circumstance but determined to fight on as best he can.

Laverty’s script comes to praise such characters, not to bury them, as a lesser writer would, in patronising clichés. To his credit, he never talks down to his heroes. These men might engage in banter better suited to the terraces than the Aristotelian Society, but they are not thick.

“Psychos,” says Eric’s mate Meatballs, talking about the antics of a local gangster, “they don’t give a flying ****.” To which a fellow drinker responds, “Is that the latest research from Stanford?” Sarcasm - the working class armour, and Laverty has a gift for making it shine.

Meatballs, played by the always great value John Henshaw (best known as loveable pub landlord Ken in TV’s Early Doors) is by far the best of a supporting cast that is hit and miss, with some of the characters trying so hard to be wacky they might as well be wearing revolving dickie bows.

But enough passing the ball around the middle of the pitch. On to King Eric. Dispensing wisdom to his namesake about love, life, the universe and everything, the Frenchman’s accent is often impenetrable but his charisma is never in doubt.

Evets and Cantona, also an executive producer on the film, make a bizarre double act, the Plato and his wayward charge, but somehow it works, even if the pupil gets a little exasperated sometimes.

“I’m up to here with your philosophy,” says Bishop. “I’m still getting over the ******* seagulls, for Christ’s sake.”

Aren’t we all. Cantona’s famous rumination on seagulls and trawlers features in the film, together with footage of some of his most memorable moments on the pitch (the Hong Kong Phooey episode is referred to in passing).

Just as Bishop starts to get his life together the fates remember that he’s in a Ken Loach film and therefore has been put on this Earth to suffer.

The detour into harsher terrain puts a dampener on proceedings, but it also gives the picture backbone and lays the ground for a memorable final act.

Standing tall at the end of this entertaining caper - yes, you read the word caper in a review of a Ken Loach movie - is Cantona. Generating the sort of million watt energy and endless je ne sais quoi he brought to the pitch in his heyday, he is the star of this picture show. He is not a man, he is an actor, he is Cantona.

Paul Greenwood's Review

Manchester postman Eric Bishop (Steve Evets) is fiftyish, divorced and endures a chaotic home life with his two unruly stepsons.

His work colleagues are always trying to cheer him up, but it’s only when former Manchester United star Eric Cantona appears in his home, spouting his own particular brand of philosophical wisdom, that Eric begins to get a grip on his life.

On the surface, Looking For Eric seems like one of those kids’ fantasy films where the hero comes out of the poster to help the young lad win the big match.

But by keeping Cantona as purely a figment of Eric’s imagination, it’s used here as a penetrating tool to open a window onto depression and how a man who is slipping through the cracks can regain his confidence and self-respect.

It’s a story of camaraderie and the unifying power of football, as Eric’s mates and the spirit of the legendary player help him get through his rough patch.

Letting the side down slightly is a subplot involving Eric’s stepson that becomes the central plot in the second half, and the film loses some of its focus and charm as a result.

But between director Ken Loach’s gift for naturalism and screenwriter Paul Laverty’s ear for everyday dialogue that’s both funny and insightful, Looking For Eric is a triumph.

Steve Evets is terrific as the other Eric, while a host of supporting players do sterling work as his postie pals.

As for Cantona, he not only oozes star quality and charisma, but he can deliver lines full of pathos and sly humour with the confidence of a seasoned actor. So much so that when he says, albeit tongue-in-cheek, “I’m not a man. I am Cantona,” you can’t do anything other than believe him.