Ken Loach’s terrific comedy Looking for Eric breaks two of his own golden rules. The film stars a celebrity actor, Eric Cantona, and it basks in magical realism. Once upon a time Loach would rather shoot himself than employ either of these Hollywood crutches. But such is the confidence he enjoys with his long-term writing partner Paul Laverty that Loach is beginning to experiment with cinema in ways that would have seem ed almost inconceivable just ten years ago.
That’s not to say that Britain’s most famous socialist director has diluted his politics one droplet. Looking for Eric is scathing about the erosion of communal values and the violent, selfish mess of inner-city life. But given that it stars one of the greatest football players to pull on a Manchester United shirt, it was inevitably going to be a film of two halves.
In the first, a postman called Eric Bishop is on the verge of a spectacular nervous breakdown. He drives the wrong way round roundabouts in his car and hides sacks of letters in his cupboards. His black and white teenage sons from back-to-back broken marriages treat Bishop like a doormat and his terraced home like a dosshouse. His 25-year-old daughter, Sam (Lucy-Jo Hudson), thoughtlessly employs him as a stopgap babysitter.
Steve Evets plays this unshaven and lonely Mancunian father with unnerving, spineless realism. In moments of desperation, Bishop simply closes the curtains, lights up a spliff and wonders aloud where it all went wrong.
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Cue Eric Cantona. In a surreal and wonderful look-behind-you moment, the French footballing legend steps out of a poster pinned to Bishop’s bedroom wall and into the rancid gloom of the middle-aged fan’s ghastly life. King Eric scares the living daylights out of the awestruck postman. It’s a sublime piece of magic by a director famously associated with raw kitchen-sink grit. The plump and bearded Cantona, wearing a smart-but-casual Boden-style ensemble, is basically a ghost, visible only to the delusional Bishop.
The two chalk-and-cheese characters sit on the bed, look at ancient Match of the Day highlights of Cantona in his pomp, and discuss how Bishop’s relationship with his first wife, Lily (Stephanie Bishop), might have worked if the shy postman had tackled her with a little more romantic flair. The fairytale pleasure of watching Cantona playing life coach to the astonished postman is rigged — deliberately and brilliantly — with real uncertainty.
The disconcerting impression in the first 45 minutes of the film is that Bishop has tragically lost his marbles. Indeed, that Cantona’s ghost has turned up only to mock and crush what’s left of Bishop’s sanity. But the film turns our expectations upside down. The sweet and healing chemistry between Evets’s working-class hero and a reflective Cantona taps a vintage Loach theme about the resilience and essential decency of human nature.
Cantona’s gobbets of wisdom sound as preposterous as his famous quote about seagulls, sardines and trawlers — which preceded a nine-month forced exile from the game after he kung-fu kicked a Crystal Palace supporter in the chest on prime-time television. But Cantona’s yogic ability to make peace with this bitter slice of his past gives Bishop the incentive to take a grip of his own scatty destiny.
Yes, it sounds like fantasy football advice. But the odd-couple comedy chimes perfectly with Loach’s deep-seated belief in that perennial sporting ethic: the need to trust your team-mates. The graphic evidence is provided by Bishop’s saintly work chums at the postal depot of his Manchester sorting office. They cover up for Bishop when he’s popping letters in all the wrong boxes. And the kindness of these working-class drudges — led by a pot-bellied John Henshaw, complete with extra-large Man United kit — brings tears to the eyes.
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When Bishop’s pimply sons fall foul of heavy-duty gangsters, as well as the local police, the hapless father has only one possibility of saving them: by making a huge leap of faith, and entrusting his problems to others. The ingenious twist is that this is exactly the leap of faith that Loach demands of us.
15, 116 mins