From director Ken Loach (Kes, Sweet Sixteen) I had heard that this film had a lot of interest surrounding it, and it sounded like something I would enjoy, so of course I watched it. Basically Manchester middle-aged postal sorting office worker Eric Bishop (Summer's Steve Evets) is going through a bad patch, mainly because of ex-wife Lily (Stephanie Bishop) coming back. To comfort himself in most circumstances he seeks advice from the one man he aspires to, and is almost hallucinogenic visions of, footballer Eric Cantona. As time goes by his relationship with Lily, who by the way left him to have their baby, improves, and he is also getting closer to teenage daughter Sam (Coronation Street's Lucy-Jo Hudson) and stepsons, including Ryan (Gerard Kearns). After being humiliated by some local gangsters with the help of a Rottweiler, and having the video put on YouTube, Eric finds out that Ryan has agreed to hide a gun in the house under the floorboards. Eric obviously turns to his imaginary friend Canona for some advice of what to do to make everything settle, and the idea of going up against the gangsters with the help of his post office friends is best. So Eric gets his friends and many Manchester United fans to help in "Operation Cantona", where they all wear the heads, or masks of the famous Eric, and they go to humiliate the gangsters. In the end, the gangsters get their comeuppance, Eric watches his daughter graduate, the whole family have worked things out, and the imaginary friend stays with his pal. Also starring John Henshaw as Meatballs, Stefan Gumbs as Jess and Justin Moorhouse as Spleen. Evets is fantastic as the nearly lonely ordinary Joe on the brink of a breakdown, and Cantona, who you also see the fantastic goals from, is brilliant as his knowledgeable invisible friend, it is a likable comedy drama. Very good!

Looking for Eric is a blend of comedy, fantasy, philosophy, and social realism that breaks the record for the most "F" words ever used in a motion picture. If it wasn't supposed to be a feel-good comedy that asks you to suspend logic, I would also suggest a "P" word – preposterous. Directed by the team of Ken Loach and Paul Laverty that has brought us such serious dramas as Sweet Sixteen, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, and My Name is Joe, Looking for Eric is funny in parts, serious in others, full of both joy and sadness, a true chiaroscuro of life, yet trying to combine gritty social realism with an absurd comic fantasy does not always work.In the film's opening, Eric Bishop (Steve Evets) is a 50'ish postal worker living in a working class section of Manchester England with his two rebellious stepsons Ryan (Gerard Kearns) and Jess (Stepfan Gumbs). Close to a nervous breakdown, Eric manages to survive a car crash but comes home to a house in a total mess and has difficulty in coping with his stepsons who do not listen to him. His friends at work led by Meatballs (John Henshaw) try to cheer him up by telling him jokes but they barely produce a smile. The ever resourceful Meatballs brings all his friends and co-workers together to lead them in process in which they are asked to see themselves through the eyes of someone who really loves them. Done with a minimum of condescension, Loach handles the activity with respect and makes the proceedings plausible.When asked to pick the person they most want to take after, one chooses Nelson Mandela, another Gandhi. Eric chooses Eric Cantona, a French hero of the Manchester United soccer team of 1990. Continuing with the theme of self awareness, Cantona, playing himself, turns up in Eric's vision (presumably as a holographic image) to guide him toward developing a stronger self image. Eric asks Cantona to recall the moments on the football field that he most cherished and, with the postman's exuberant narration, the moments are replayed on screen to almost magical effect. Asked to describe the highlight of his career, instead of talking about a goal he scored, Cantona humbly mentions the time he passed off to a teammate who then scored.Meanwhile, as Cantona supplies the postman with enough proverbs to rival the Book of Solomon, his daughter Sam (Lucy-Jo Hudson) asks him to babysit for her small child while she finishes her education. This leads Eric to confront having to reunite with his ex-wife Lily (Stephanie Bishop) who he walked out on 25 years ago when she was pregnant. Feeling trapped, he turns to Cantona who reminds him that "We always have more choices than we think," After having been talked by his soccer hero through the guilt of abandoning his wife, Eric and Lily meet after many years and remember their most romantic moments when he wore blue suede shoes and they danced together.Unfortunately, Looking for Eric goes off track in the latter part of the film with a convoluted plot involving his stepson Ryan, local hoods, a gun planted in his house, police brutality, and all kinds of high energy mayhem that sends the film into sensory overload. While Loach and Laverty's message about how life works better when we are open and include the people that are closest to us in our problems is a good one, the film eventually becomes so absurd and heavy-handed that it threatens to destroy the charm it had built up earlier. Looking for Eric is an entertaining and heartwarming film that has moments of sheer delight but, as a whole, the ball never quite reaches the net.

Being an armchair Manchester United fan now for almost 20 years i had a lot of interest in seeing Ken Loachs' film when i first got wind of it.The presence of Eric Cantona still looms large over Old Trafford and indeed fans still sing his name to this day.In a way,watching Looking For Eric made me fall in love with Cantona and Manchester United all over again. This film does what all good fantasy films should do , it makes you feel good. We start the film with our central character in the depths of unhapiness and witness a transformation,thanks to life coaching by Eric Cantona (watch out Paul McKenna) . Cantona is a man with undeniable presence.Those who might sneer and scoff at his attempts to break in to the film world will be made to eat their words as Cantona brings every ounce of mysticism and humanity to his performance. It's true that it pays to know about Cantona and the impression he made upon the English game of football. In all the years since he has left the game, no one has quite replicated what he achieved. He will be remembered by Manchester United fans alongside greats like Best and Charlton and now also by movie fans for a touching and memorable performance in a film that deserves high praise.

Loach's Looking for Eric combines some of the best work he's previously done in regards to a realistic, low-level set aesthetic combined with some universal themes of contemporary middle aged men in crisis, all the while filtered through the light comedy and crime drama genres. It's to the film's great credit that it doesn't linger too often on one of the items Loach explored here, while this project in the hands of a lesser director may well have come across as more misguided than it actually does here. As a journey of self-discovery; a horrifying urban crime tale and a study of mental illness, the film covers enough ground on most levels without ever feeling like it caters for any of the above.The film plunges the viewer head first into the world of a certain Eric Bishop (Evets); who's a single and ageing postman living in Manchester with son Jess (Gumbs) and stepson Ryan (Kearns), in a small house that results in messy and cramped living conditions. The film begins and concludes with two very different, but somewhat equally frightening, sequences with the first thing we're presented with being a suicide attempt that sees Eric driving the wrong way around a roundabout. The film finishes off its narrative with a sequence that resembles what a number of 2004 film Dead Man's Shoes' scenes might've looked like had it been co-made by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright.But Bishop isn't the only Eric of the film, indeed footballer Eric Cantona makes a number of brief appearances as himself in both found footage format, when the film displays a number instances in which he is playing football, as well as in hallucinatory form when postman Eric sees him and talks to him. In decoding the title of the film, we establish the sort of arc its lead will go on. Whatever initial 'looking' in regards to Eric anybody does is postman Eric's searching for some kind of way to make sense of everything; this is then followed by a 'looking' for himself, a searching of one's self and how one can overcome the obstacles such as marital issues; maintaining healthy relationships with one's friends and family members as well as an alarming situation which arises to do with a firearm.Bishop escapes to his own space, his bedroom, when things get tougher than they ought to be when at home with his sons and their own friends whom clutter things up even more. Further still, he uses Cantona, and memories of Cantona as a footballer, to escape to a happier time and place. He hasn't been to a match at his beloved Manchester United for many years, and can only gaze on in a forlorn state at his sons as they clamber into a black jeep with their own contacts, match bound. Eric's despair; suicidal ideation and what we have to perceive as his schizophrenia, are all handled with the greatest of respects. When Cantona first appears and begins to communicate with Eric, he takes him through the process of confronting both the past and his flaws in a very realistic and down to Earth manner; asking him to explore what is inside of Eric's bedroom trunk, which mostly houses memorabilia from Eric's marriage to now estranged child-hood sweetheart named Lily. This premise of forthrightly confronting one's fears is relatively simplistic but works well. From here, the film beautifully spaces the interactions between either Eric, and allows the character of Bishop to naturally progress.In addition to the principal study running throughout, Loach retreads some old ground that recalls the sorts of work he did in both 1991's Riff Raff and 2001's The Navigators; this when he enters a comfort zone which provides some fascinating, dialogue driven cinema in some everyday locations as those of a working class sit around and just talk in that ultra-realistic manner Loach seems to execute with consummate ease, every time making for riveting viewing and desperately straddling that fine line between documentary and fiction. You know the instances I mean; those times when it's as if the actors are still talking on the set but the cameras have been accidentally left running. But I think Loach identifies the severity and sensitive nature of his primary subject matter, thus he limits these sorts of scenes to only one or two occasions. The comedy is additionally blended in well, with no aim to exploit the respective situations; with instances such as Eric accidentally spraying paint onto his work clothes and his stepson encountering him in the kitchen shouting "No!", in French, after Cantona told him to.Looking for Eric is a tasteful observation of a man in crisis, someone whom you think is able to enjoy what life has to throw at him, but finds it difficult to channel it towards the surface and therefore express it. The notion of hallucinating a figure to help you through times of distress is something that has been explored before, but Loach brings something different to it; something I wouldn't describe as 'lighthearted', more-so 'delicate', or just down to Earth. Refreshingly, the sensation that a person is seeing and actually communicating with something that's not there isn't overplayed or put across as this amazing; fantastic event that everyone's attention should be drawn to. Loach observes the USP, but does not make it the centrepiece of his film; rather, he allows it to play out around a story of identifying meaningful friendships and rectifying marital mistakes. Well handled; well executed and not over-egged nor patronising, Looking for Eric buries the proverbial volley with aplomb.