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. (29/03/2010)