The Beautiful Game

Ken Loach and Paul Laverty prove themselves to be one of cinema’s strongest director-writer duos with their latest film Looking for Eric. Like the pair’s previous collaborations (My Name is Joe, Sweet Sixteen) Looking for Eric is rooted in the challenging world of working-class Britain, but unlike those films it contains a good dollop of comedy and some gentle surrealism to tell a story of male friendship, football and how to find your feet during life’s more challenging times. Eric Bishop (Steve Evets) is a postman from Manchester who is dreading the prospect of meeting his ex-wife, Lily (Stephanie Bishop), after more than 30 years and who has begun to feel that life has passed him by. One night, with the help of a spliff stolen from his son’s bedroom, Eric’s football idol Eric Cantona pays a visit and offers some words of advice to help him get his life back on track.

Speaking at the first showing of the film in Cannes, Loach spoke of his desire to turn his hand to something more light-hearted. “We had done a couple of films that were really quite tough so we thought it might be nice to do a film with a smile on our faces. You can say [that] a comedy is a tragedy with a happy ending and the story in this film could go many different ways. I guess we felt that what we had to do was play the story with truth and I think that’s a tribute to the actors we worked with. They played it dead true and sometimes that’s funny and sometimes it’s sad.”

At the heart of Looking for Eric is a human story about one man coming to terms with the way his life has panned out and his relationships with those around him. Yet hovering not far beneath the narrative there is also a more far-reaching political message, something that Loach is particularly known for. As the director says, “It’s a film against individualism: we’re stronger as a gang than we are on our own. You can be pretentious about this but it is about the solidarity of friends, which is epitomised in a crowd of football supporters. But also where you work and the people you work alongside. Although that seems an almost trite observation, it’s still not the spirit of the age. Or it hasn’t been the spirit of the age for the last 30 years, where people are your competitors, not your comrades.”

Looking for Eric also explores the intriguing character of Cantona himself. Whilst well-known on the pitch and increasingly on the screen, in this film we even see the man play the trumpet (something he says he learnt during his 9-month ban). It’s one of scriptwriter Laverty’s favourite moments of the film. “I love that surreal scene in the film when Big Eric armed with his trumpet and little Eric armed with his memory, stand on a council flat balcony and look out over Manchester and the world beyond. I find each misplaced note magical, a hymn to all those imperfect messy lives out there.”

Talking alongside Loach at Cannes, Cantona revealed a love of the cinema and his desire to carry on working in film. “If I’m here today and if I’m continuing to shoot films it’s because it’s a real passion for me” he says. “I stopped football at the age of thirty because I lost my passion for the game. So long as I feel this great passion for the cinema I’ll continue to shoot films. The day I’m no longer passionate about it I’ll stop and turn my mind to something else.”

More specifically, he expressed an appreciation of Loach’s own work. “I love Ken’s films: It’s a Free World, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Riff-Raff, Family Life, all these fabulous films which are real classics and will go down in the history of the cinema for ever more. I also love Pasolini’s films, it’s a completely different style, of course, but I love his films too.”

It’s easy to forget that whilst well-respected in the UK, Ken Loach is held in even higher esteem in Europe where his films reach a far wider audience. This seems particularly ironic given how firmly rooted his films are in British culture and society. Looking for Eric, however, may help change that: for one the film is set to open in a greater number of cinemas than his previous films and for another there’s a sense that with its humour and charm it will be more accessible and appealing to UK audiences than the grit and grime of much of Loach’s previous work. It may also be helped along by the charismatic performance of a certain well-known footballer, philosopher, actor and now trumpet player, Eric Cantona.