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Looking For Eric.It's not a comedy exactly, but I felt it 's definitely Ken Loach's lightest, happiest film for some time and still managed to make me smile on a fair few occasions.
A wacky if erratic and self-conscious buddy movie about a depressed middle-aged postman and Manchester United fan called Eric Bishop who suffers a breakdown brought on by family troubles and his illicit and not inconsiderable consumption of his stepson's weed supply. In this fragile, delusional condition, he is visited by his great, barrel-chested, monobrowed hero, Eric Cantona who thorough his enigmatic (if not at times utterly impregnable) gift for poetry, symbolism and impenetrable French accent tries to lift him from his mire of depression.
That is perhaps a problem. When the inscrutible Gaul delivered his famous line at the press conference about the trawler and the sardines (nostalgically reprised over the final credits) he did it with glacial slowness, so that reporters would not miss a word. It seems that Cantona now has different ideas about delivery. Since he is a fully fledged legend, professional actor and indeed this film's executive producer, it can't be easy, even for Loach, to tell him how to speak the dialogue or play himself. So Cantona is allowed to throw his lines away: he gabbles them, he burbles them, he murmurs them, as it were, into his upturned collar. Sometimes he speaks French, sometimes English in a very heavy accent, and it isn't easy to tell which is which.
If you can take this minor flaw in you stride then it shouldn't detract from your enjoyment of this enthralling little dram-com as he always has a mischievous twinkle, a cheeky touch of self-satire, mixed in with his unfaked and in fact unfakable amour propre. When the awed Bishop asks Cantona what he did during his suspension, and Cantona replies that he learned the trumpet, and proceeds to take one out and play, it is a gloriously surreal moment.
The part of Eric Bishop is also interesting casting. Steve Evets is a jobbing performer and former musician who is one of those many people who were once in the Fall and, like so many, fell out with lead singer Mark E Smith.
He doesn't look like an actor, with actor-ish mannerisms; he seems like a real, likable guy with real emotions, and his perennial stunned expression of "what-am-I-doing-here-and-what-is-going-on?" is very appropriate and adds to the realism of the parts of the experience outside of the main protagonists breakdown/weed induced psychosis.
An uneasy then solid bond occurs between 'Eric and Eric' and the pair swap tips on how to cope with the dark times and reminisce over Cantona’s goals, cueing several stirring montages of balls hitting the back of the net. Eric might tire a little of the Frenchman’s gnomic advice (‘I’m still getting over the seagulls one!’), but an amusing, touching friendship emerges that slowly nudges a suicidal man back towards the solidarity of the workplace, the family and the terraces – a fading solidarity that the film both celebrates and laments.
Without giving too much of the plot away Eric is dragged into a darker side of local life by his stepson becoming involved with local drug-dealing lowlife and I have to say his strategy for removing himself from his predicament and keeping his family and burgeoning 'matters amour' with his ex-wife (and erstwhile love of his life)intact are somewhat unexpected and raised more than a little belly laugh in this locale.
If you're a fan of the sort of gritty, real-life humour that Loach has been famed for in the past then grab a squiz at this recent offering .. I don't think you'll be dissappointed .. quite the contrary.
I like him ... He says "Okie Dokie!"
by Bridie » Thu Sep 10, 2009 6:46 am 
.. 
Shucks.
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