Looking for Eric

Looking for Eric

Directed by Ken Loach

Runtime: 116 min.

At age 76, British filmmaker Ken Loach—who transformed British cinema by bringing realistic, documentary-style observation to the dramatic treatment of working-class life—tries something new in Looking for Eric. It’s a comedy that blends unexpected fantasy into Loach’s standard political perception: Eric (Steve Evets), who has a rummy’s flushed face and distracted manner, lives the disheveled life of a hapless divorced bachelor. He has a good heart: kind to his unwed daughter and grandchild; mentor to two parentless, misguided teens. But soccer is Eric’s personal outlet—a passion that, since Bill Bruford’s non-fiction book Among the Thugs and Morrissey’s Your Arsenal album, adds nuance and breadth to the understanding of proletarian angst.

Loach counters worklife clichés starting with an un-Office premise where laborers pass time conscious of each other’s boredom. Eric and his coworkers ponder methods of coping. When they meditate, imagining “someone who has confidence and charisma you’d like to emulate,” Eric hails: “King Eric.” This honest, pure expression feeling for Manchester United’s star player Eric Cantona signals Eric’s own arrested adolescence. Loach has not shown such empathy since Kes, his 1970 film about a boy’s relationship to a falcon. It relieves this story of an emotionally damaged male’s problems (letter-sorter Eric must resolve issues with his ex-wife, a neighborhood gangster endangers the boys in his house) without the strictly political slant that sometimes overtakes Loach’s films.

A 6-foot, life-size poster of Cantona dominates Eric’s bedroom. In his loneliness, Eric talks to the pop-shrine, asking, “Have you ever done anything you’re ashamed of?” From the depths of that identification and desperate entreaty, Cantona himself materializes.

Once strapping, lithe and stout-thewed, Cantona’s now beefy but still an imposing figure. His native French accent suggests Lancelot, giving courtly advice to Eric about repairing his life. Loach’s semiimprovisatory approach uses the Cantona fantasy to get at bigger issues than Eric’s inversion, bigger themes than the alter-ego gimmick—which critics have compared to Woody Allen’s Bogart-fantasizing Play It Again, Sam.

Looking for Eric more richly resembles Lionel Baier’s superb 2004 Belgian docudrama Garon Stupide, where a young gay hustler’s obsession with a soccer player clarified both his sense of inadequacy and quest for desire. Evets’ performance feels as emotionally authentic as Pierre Chatagny’s in Garon Stupide. When Eric explains to his estranged but beloved Lily (Stephanie Bishop), “I was putting on an act, I couldn’t get back what I was,” it’s more credible than the self-pitying sap of The Wrestler and Crazy Heart. Those movies were unhelpfully obsessed with the loss of celebrity status; Loach’s political skepticism makes him question the very basis of such social elevation in contrast to the lowly lives of the masses. Loach knows social oppression can be as disabling as inner demons.

Loach explores the deeper meaning of adoration just as filmmakers like Baier fearlessly perceived in (gay) male experience. In Unconditional Love, P.J. Hogan used appearances by Julie Andrews and Lynn Redgrave to similarly define the difference between celebrities as idols or inspiration. Sometimes Looking For Eric stakes this insight further, culminating in an image of mass transformation that is the sweetest neorealist image since De Sica’s Miracle in Milan. Even though the script by Paul Laverty seems to jumble social problems, Loach maintains a focused emotional core: the ways men screw-up their lives in spite of the masculine role models they revere. Flashing back to his youth and his own father’s “hard little eyes and clipped tongue,” it’s no wonder Eric submits to a fantasy life with the great Cantona at its center. He undoubtedly shares that fantasy with untold millions. That’s the key to Loach’s newfound charm.