Looking for Eric

I have always wondered what impresses me so much about the guy with the Brezhnev vegetation above his eyes and with his collar up. Now i get it. Ken Loach filmed an unbalanced mix of social drama, comedy and love story, and it's all led by a man with walking charisma - Eric Cantona. For me, the film amounts to 116 minutes of extraordinarily entertaining spectacle with an extraordinarily positive undertone and an extraordinarily subtle grid of a view of the English "proletariat". A passionate apotheosis of football, camaraderie and hopeless losers, headed by the god-man Cantona in a wonderfully self-parodying creation. Even though at certain points I thought that Loach just couldn't hold this all together, it always somehow worked out miraculously, and I came out of the movie theatre feeling like a citizen of a pretty normal planet and a pretty normal society. As long as the phantoms of football geniuses appear to postmen and advise them about love, then we're going to be alright. This is a warm film full of formal holes, but with perfect focus and an ending worthy of Eric. (03/29/2010)

Movies by Ken Loach are always terribly difficult essays for me. The themes are very close to me, but with characters I don't understand at all. In the case of this film, Eric Cantona again absolutely lured me in, but when the social case Eric, who is totally normal Steve Evets, appeared on the scene, I couldn't help but shake my head. The genre of social drama is handled maybe on point here, but if it wasn't for the slightly unbelievable final scene, which is like from another movie, I would probably have settled for the director's traditional three-star rating. However, the best scenes of the film go to the local pub and to the fans of two different Manchesters. (02/12/2024)