Cantona’s football film fails to score with all critics

Not even the talismanic powers of Eric 'King' Cantona will be enough to win Ken Loach the Palme d'Or at Cannes a second time, if the reviews for the British director's much-anticipated comedy Looking for Eric continue the way they've begun.
 
Despite huge applause at its film festival premiere, the first review in Britain - by Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw - gives Looking for Eric just three out of five stars. It is a "lovably good-natured if erratic comedy" in which Cantona, playing himself, helps a depressed postman and football fan out of his middle-aged crisis. The former Manchester United forward is "excellent comic value", though Bradshaw notes that Cantona's "accent is still a bit impenetrable... it isn't easy to tell if he is speaking in French or English".
 
But it is the film's darker moments which are less convincing, says Bradshaw. In one "very grim" sequence, the postman - who is also called Eric - and his mates devise an unlikely plan to get revenge on a local criminal. "It's frankly a pretty naive view of how to take revenge on a psychopathic gangster," says Bradshaw, "though it reminded me, not unpleasantly, of something by the old Children's Film Foundation."

Variety, the US showbusiness bible, describes the film as a "curious hybrid" of "boilerplate, socially aware Loach; personal fantasy [and] romantic comedy", and wonders: "How many fans of the now-retired Cantona will turn out to see a Loach pic, especially in Blighty, remains a moot point, especially when word gets out that the Manchester United icon is only in a few scenes."

Loach won the 2006 Palme d'Or for The Wind That Shakes the Barley, set nearly a century ago, about two brothers who join the IRA to fight for Irish independence from Britain. ·