Looking For Eric is lazy, condescending film making. And if it were not for Ken Loach’s convincing past record, with, for instance, My Name Is Joe, one might suspect that he secretly despises the working class.

Here we have another tired attempt to show that the English working class are the salt of the earth, and the only unexpected element comes in a reasonably convincing portrayal of Eric Cantona as a wise man. I never would have guessed that. I always thought that he was a bit thick. It is, of course, Cantona playing himself, and the film was his idea in the first place.

(Maybe it is just because Cantona is French. The film implies in a muddy kind of way that to be French is in itself to be special. There are lots of things muddily and unconvincingly implied in this film.)

Eric (the postman) seems powerless to prevent the disintegration of his life. After two failed marriages, he has been lumbered with two teenage stepsons in a shambles of a household when Eric (the ex-footballer) appears to him during an escapist cannabis binge. Together, they set out to repair his broken life and, along the way, take on the local snarling psycho drug baron.

The scriptwriter, Paul Laverty, must have been working on the assumption that he would be playing to an audience that had never seen any of his past collaborations with Loach. Ordinary Northern English “blokes” are sharp-tongued, but wholly well-intentioned and sound, and the bad men are really, really nasty but cave in as soon as they are put to the test by the communal strength of the good guys.

Loach is determined, in this film, to paint characters as caricatures, and it’s not a surprise. He has been getting away with this a bit too long.

In one scene, six white, middle-aged postmen are asked to close their eyes and imagine themselves as someone famous they would love to be. Two name black men – Sammy Davis, Jr. and Nelson Mandela – one says Fidel Castro, and the other three choose Frank Sinatra, Ghandi, and Eric Cantona. I seriously doubt this is representative of any normal bunch of Northern English working men, especially as the BNP returned two MEPs in northern constituencies in the UK European elections on June 5. It would be a conceivable scenario if these six men were playing the local cadre of the Socialist Workers Party, but they are not. They are meant to be ordinary postmen.

In the real world, normal people are not very politically aware. Maybe Loach is beginning to tire of fighting against that reality and is descending now into turning his heroes into pantomime figures as a kind of revenge.

There is one moment of real excitement when the law, heavy-handedly of course, breaks in on a family reunion. It is tedious film, though, in more places than it is enjoyable. The worst and best that can be said of it is that it is mostly harmless. The music written for this film is also horribly routine and very accurately reflects the pedestrian nature of the enterprise. – Joe McCarthy