Looking For Eric review I Full Cannes Film Festival coverage

The biggest star in Cannes today is an actor who has never won an award or taken a starring role in a major film.

But even among jaded film hacks Eric Cantona’s arrival for the premiere of Ken Loach’s Looking For Eric has triggered the sort of starry-eyed hero worship that only the biggest Hollywood names usually command at film festivals.

The former Manchester United and France footballer was mobbed by journalists asking for autographs after a press conference in which questions about sport comfortably outnumbered questions about cinema.

Cantona was always an unusually charismatic presence on and off the pitch. He scored glorious goals, made match-winning passes and helped turn Manchester United into serial winners of Premier League trophies but he was also famously banned for leaping into the crowd and kicking a fan.

After his conviction for assault he memorably offered only one gnomic sentence: “When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea".

There were no such pearls of enigmatic wisdom this morning but Cantona’s puffed-out chest and imperial strut were instantly familiar even if the shirt collar was folded down over a skinny Armani tie.

Looking for Eric is the tale of a depressed Mancunian postman whose life is falling apart until Eric Cantona, his hero, begins to appear to him in cannabis-induced hallucinations and steers him towards a better future. The original concept to make a film about Eric Cantona’s relationship with a fan came from Cantona and his brothers, who offered it to Loach and his regular writer, Paul Laverty. They then transformed the original idea into the current film.

Both the footballer and the director are unabashed admirers of each other’s work. Cantona has been an ardent cinema fan since childhood and loves Loach’s films (he listed The Wind that Shakes the Barley from 2006 and Riff Raff from 1991 as particular favourites) and also Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian film-maker who made the notorious Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom from 1975.

Loach, a Bath City fan, said that Cantona “acts as he plays football: with flair and creativity”.

According to the producer, Rebecca O’Brien, when the two men met for the first time she had to do most of the talking because “Eric and Ken were both blushing”.

Looking For Eric is Loach’s 23rdfilm. He won the Palme d’Or for The Wind that Shakes the Barley and is particularly admired in France, where his films have tended to do better at the box office than in the UK.

Cantona has made 14 films since he retired from football while still close to his peak in 1997. However many have been bit parts (a French courtier in Elizabeth, “Petanque player Number two” in a film called The High Life).

This is, by a distance, his most high-profile role.

“I have been really living with this passion for quite some time,” he said. “Now it is up to other people to say whether I am a real actor or not. I stopped football at the age of 30 because I lose my passion for the game. The day I’m no longer passionate about acting I will turn my hand to something else.”

It could be jazz. There is a scene in the film where Cantona plays the trumpet, having started lessons to keep himself busy during his nine-month suspension for the attack on the fan. He loves Miles Davis and Chet Baker.

Much of Cantona’s dialogue consists of pseudo-proverbs that draw on popular memories of the seagull quotation, with lines such as “nobody forgets Rock and Roll” and “He that sows thistles shall reap prickles”.

Playing himself enabled him to show a less haughty side than the one that many football fans remember, Cantona said. “I like having a good laugh. It’s very important — it’s a weapon.”

Working with Loach was “very similar” to working for Sir Alex Ferguson, the manager of Manchester United and, like Loach, a man with strong left-wing principles who has been an international figure for decades.

“They [acting and playing football] are two activities that are totally different. But the way they go about getting 100 per cent out of the actors or the players is very similar. The great difficulty is to be good from match to match or from film to film.”

Both men excel at “finding new ambitions for the players and actors to ensure that everyone progresses.”

Inevitably Cantona was asked who would win the Champions League final between Manchester United and Barcelona a week on Wednesday.

“That’s a key issue”, he smiled. “But I will give you a straight answer: Manchester.”

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