Eric Cantona on working with Ken Loach I Full Cannes Film Festival coverage

Ken Loach couldn't have painted a more perfect, bitter-sweet picture for Cannes. “Looking for Eric” stars the French football legend Eric Cantona in a rare Loach comedy. Needless to say, it's a film of two halves. In the first, a postman called Eric Bishop is having a spectacular nervous breakdown. He drives the wrong way around roundabouts; the cupboards in his thoroughly grubby Manchester terrace are stuffed with unmailed letters. His black and white teenage sons from two broken marriages treat him like a doormat. And he's still hounded by guilt for leaving his first wife -- the love of his life -- Lily.

Cue Eric Cantona. How would the King handle Bishop's assorted crises? In a surreal and comic scene, the Manchester United football player steps out of a poster on the wall of Bishop's rancid bedroom and starts dispensing gnomic gobbets of advice. It's an extraordinary piece of magic realism for a director who usually specialises in impeccable art house grit.

Cantona is basically a ghost, visible only to the delusional Bishop. His vague advice about how to handle Lily and the boys is delivered like poetry. Indeed, Cantona's famous quote to the press about sardines and seagulls -- after he kung-fu kicked a Crystal Palace supporter in the chest to earn a nine-month suspension -- is central to the haphazard joy of this barmy comedy.

But the pleasure of watching a bearded Cantona playing life coach to the astonished and grateful Bishop is rigged -- deliberately and brilliantly -- with uncertainty. The morbid impression in the first half of the film is that Bishop has tragically lost his marbles. His work-mates and friends, notably John Henshaw's bullish and kindly Meatballs, indulge Bishop's delusion in a touching and desperate effort to put his life and sanity back together.

The second half of the film is much broader and far less dark. There's an unmistakable dash of Woody Allen's “Play It Again, Sam” about Paul Laverty's script. Cantona takes the postman on healthy training runs through the park and turns up at Bishop’s local pub to have a chat about the importance of sharing problems. The sweet and healing chemistry between Steve Evets's confused hero and Cantona taps a vintage Loach theme about the resilience and essential decency of human nature.

A marvellous scene in which Bishop quizzes Eric about his finest moment, while the two of them are watching old television clips of Cantona in action, illustrates how the iconic Frenchman believed in the ideal of the team more than in individual glory. That sense of solidarity goes straight to the heart of the film, in which a classic bit of old-fashioned teamwork is required to rescue one of Bishop's sons from the clutches of a local gangster.

The upbeat way that Bishop goes about it with Cantona by his side has made Loach a strong favourite for the biggest prize in Cannes. It wouldn’t be the first time that he has taken home the Palme d’Or - he won it in 2006 with "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" - but it would be a sensation if Loach did it with a comedy.

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