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.