Looking for Eric

Ken Loach is best known for his working-class stories and the humanity of his films. With Looking for Eric, he uses low-end digital video, flat lighting and cheesy music to peer into the low-end, flat and cheesy life of postal worker Eric Bishop. Bishop is a huge fan of retired soccer star Eric Cantona, and when Bishop’s life is disrupted by the reappearance of his ex-wife, he starts seeing visions of his idol. Cantona plays himself, and if you’re a big Eric Cantona fan, you’ll enjoy these sequences. If, like most of humanity, you have no idea who Eric Cantona is, then Looking for Eric will be to you what a documentary on Elvis would be to a 14th-century Franciscan monk. There’s nice dialogue, though some of it is rendered incomprehensible by the British working-class accents—and then suddenly, halfway through a film about feelings, there’s a crazy plot about a gun, a gangster and four-dozen postal workers wearing Eric Cantona masks. If you can look past one awful plot decision, hard-to-understand accents and low-end technical execution, you’ll find a nice story about a middle-age man pushing his way through life. But that’s a lot to get past.