Looking for Eric

Cinemas nationwide

It seems slightly ridiculous now that we ever called Eric Cantona a footballer-cum-actor. With the benefit of hindsight he seems like an actor-cum-footballer who just enjoyed playing on the stage that soccer afforded him. Everything he did seemed to come with a theatrical edge to it. The collar up, the chest out, the preening strut – it all seemed like part of a performance.

It's not something that Cantona himself would dispute. Commenting on footballers he once said, "I think we are all actors. We train to play tactics like people in the theatre rehearse a text. And we perform for an audience. We have to be ready to improvise from the tactics, like actors improvise from a script. People come to judge us on our performance, they are critics. You have a director, you have a manager. Football and theatre, it is a lot the same."

It's one thing to realise you're in a play though, it's something else entirely to play the part well. We've all grown sick of watching players in meaningless games rip off their shirts and celebrate as if they've just discovered a cure for cancer (when Alexander Fleming isolated penicillin he famously pulled his lab coat over his head and ran around his laboratory doing the aeroplane) but Cantona stood apart from the crowd.

When he scored arguably his best goal for Manchester United, the sublime run and chip against Sunderland in December 1996, he reacted by standing on the one spot and slowly turning to take the acclaim. It was as if he was too cool to sully his moment of brilliance by doing something as ungainly as celebrating. Better just to stand there like a victorious gladiator and nod, "Oui, I 'ave scored." He was like a French footballer that was dreamt up by Monty Python, a completely over-the-top stereotype, gifted but prone to outbursts of anger and as likely to smear himself in chocolate while reading love poetry as he was to score a last-minute winner.

Given his winning turn in Ken Loach's comedy Looking for Eric we know he's a funny guy. And perhaps that's it; maybe he was playing a role in his own sitcom for years. A comedy a bit like Curb Your Enthusiasm where the central character is a grump who finds himself getting into awkward situations and the show is too cool to have a laugh track or to even care if you get the joke.

Granted some of his behaviour wasn't particularly funny. Spitting at fans, attacking teammates and diving into horrendous tackles is the kind of behaviour that has turned Joey Barton into a persona non grata, but then he never quite managed to carry off those incidents with the sheer Frenchness that Cantona did.

And some of Cantona's moments of madness were sublime. Like calling his national team manager a "bag of shit" in a live TV interview. Or being summoned before a disciplinary commission and screaming "Idiot" in the face of each blazer. And of course there was his madder than mad Jack McMad moment, leaping over the advertising hoardings to kick Matthew Simmons – a moment that was so perfectly captured on film it was used by Ash as the cover for their 'Kung Fu' single, and so perfectly scripted it had its own twist in the tale, when Simmons (a charming character who had attended BNP and National Front rallies and had a conviction for attempted violent robbery) actually attempted his own vault-and-kick manoeuvre at the prosecution counsel when he was sentenced to a week in prison for his role in the incident. Farce, not tragedy.

Cantona's subsequent suspension also led to him informing the bemused world media on the habits of seagulls, a fantastic quote that he recently confessed to Jonathan Ross was utter nonsense. "I said these words, these lines that mean nothing. Everybody tried to analyse these words and I love that." The moment from the press conference appears in Looking for Eric and on closer inspection it looks like Cantona, particularly when he drinks some water mid-sentence, is struggling hard to repress a smile as he delivers the line.

In the film Cantona plays an imagined spiritual guide to a Manchester postman called Eric, delivering gnomic aphorisms to guide his namesake through some tough times. He's meant to be playing himself (or "lui-même" as the credits put it) but of course he's not, rather he is simply reprising the character that excited or enraged crowds during his years in English soccer. And of course nobody plays the part of Eric Cantona better than Eric Cantona.

The film itself is fine, sweet entertainment, even if some of the supposed gritty realism is more unlikely than actually having Cantona as your life coach, but it only truly kicks into a higher gear for the handful of scenes the Frenchman pops up in – which makes the film not dissimilar to games that Cantona played in.

The fact that he is able to riff so perfectly on his persona to generate laughs shows a level of self-awareness that you'd imagine would be beyond many professional soccer players. The United fans still refer to him as King Eric but he seems to fancy himself more as a clown prince, and if we aren't laughing with him, the joke is on us.

pnugent@tribune.ie