Enigmatic for the people

This is not an interview. It is a performance. The subject is not a man. He is Eric Cantona. Yes. We can keep talking like this. Indefinitely.

Maybe.
The funny thing about meeting Eric Cantona is that the experience conforms so very closely to what one might suppose. Indeed, I cannot recommend meeting Monsieur Cantona highly enough. True, he’s taller than I expected, looking less like a gourmand than he has done, but with oak-like shoulders that give one the impression of standing before a Titan. He is, despite this godlike presence, rather less assuming than you might think. Speaking in soft, heavily-accented French, he bows his head as he speaks and does that Princess Diana thing of looking up with wide plaintive eyes.
I had snorted when, two days earlier, his representative explained that Eric did not want his picture taken on account of being ‘shy’. But maybe she’s right. When he asks the waiting staff for a cup of coffee, he does so with the humble air of a Dickens orphan. (They, in turn, marvel that Eric Cantona drinks coffee like regular people.)
For the most part, however, Cantona is singularly, spectacularly Cantona-like (Cantona-esque? Cantonavian?). There are eccentric touches; his shirt is rumpled to a degree that only a Frenchman could pull off and he requests that we conduct the interview standing up, having sat around talking to us journalists all day.
I am honoured. I think.
Frankly, such is his charisma, I’d somehow have been flattered if he’d asked me to stand on my head. This is Eric Cantona, not a regular interviewee. It is impossible not to feel a pleasing frisson when he gets cryptic or philosophical.
“There is no difference between the football player and the fan,” he tells me. “It is the same feeling for all of us. The fans communicate for us. The players are not gods above them. We are all in this together.”
He grins until he cracks up when I, as a Liverpool fan, recount the times he ruined my life. But he’s not here today to talk about the game he retired from just over a decade ago. He’s not even here to rap about his duties as the captain of the French Beach Football side. He is, rather, here to discuss the complicated business of being Eric Cantona, the actor, playing Eric Cantona, the construct.
The occasion is Looking For Eric, one of the unlikeliest comedies of 2009. The brainchild of kitchen sink veteran Ken Loach, his virtuoso regular screenwriter Paul Laverty and M. Cantona, the film charts the cheerful redemption of its sat-upon postman protagonist, played with impeccable comic poignancy by Steve Evets, an actor who, in common with most of the greater Manchester area, was once the bassist with The Fall.
The premise is delightful; whenever postal worker Eric sparks up a joint from his wayward son’s stash, his footballing idol and namesake appears to hog the joint, neck some wine and offer warm-hearted lessons about the value of family and community. Throughout his performance as “lui-même”, M. Cantona proves a champion of self-deprecation spouting enigmatic pearls of wisdom – “He who is afraid to throw the dice, will never throw a six” – and playing a leaden version of ‘La Marseillaise’ on the trumpet, an instrument he took up after a certain incident with a Crystal Palace fan.
“I must trust in Ken and Paul”, says M. Cantona. “I know that we can work together only under these conditions. And I am aussi, also willing to trust, to do everything that came from the script. I know we can only win this way.”
Eric Cantona is a long-standing Loach fan. An old-school French socialist whose grandfather fought in the Spanish Civil War, he gets what Mr. Loach is all about and can talk you through every film; Family Life is a favourite. There is moreover a shared sensibility. M. Cantona looks positively mirthful when Paul Laverty fills him in on his last visit to Ireland and the various verbal spats he and Loach had with Unionist minded types over The Wind That Shakes The Barley.
“With my two brothers, Jean-Marie and Joel, I wrote a two-page story and wanted to make some kind of movie,” says Cantona of Looking For Eric’s conception. “We met a French production company, called Why Not?, and the first name we put on the list was Ken Loach. No question.”
When I meet Loach later, he tells me he thought the entire thing was a ‘leg-pull’ until he finally met with Cantona, who, he says, consistently impressed him as an actor.
“Perhaps,” says the 72 year-old director, “we ought to revise our notions about footballers.”
The former footballer certainly has made strides in his second profession. He received glowing notices for his role in 2003’s L’Outremangeur and intends to branch into feature film directing, following on from his 2002 Charles Bukowski inspired short, Bring Me Your Love. Film, he says, is a logical extension of his need to perform.
“We perform on the pitch, we perform on the set,” he avers. “But when I retire from football, I have a wonderful time as a footballer, but as an actor I am starting off. I always love cinema. I do not have so much time for it when I was a player. There is training and resting. Now I have production company with my brothers (also former footballers) and I will concentrate on that.”
I wonder how much of the film’s chilled-out, pot-smoking, beach deity, M. Cantona is willing to acknowledge as “lui-même”?
“I give Paul freedom. The artist must have freedom. But it is all part of my personality,” he smiles. Cryptically.
The seagull has landed.

Looking For Eric is in cinemas now