‘Cantona’ Review: A Nostalgia-Inducing Eric Cantona Doc

Football superstar Eric Cantona, the poetic yet pugilistic French striker who played best for English club Manchester United in the 1990s, gets the whole the-man-the-myth-the-legend treatment in the starkly if aptly titled documentary Cantona.

The latest from sports-movie stylists David Tryhorn and Ben Nicholas, who co-directed the comparable single-soccer-subject profile Pele as well as The Figo Affair: The Transfer That Changed Football, this zippy package combines plenty of recently shot interview snippets with Cantona himself, cantankerous but charismatic as ever, with encomiums from three of his most significant colleagues: Man U manager Alex Ferguson, French mentor Guy Roux and teammate David Beckham. Plus his parents. It’s all interspersed with lashings of archive material, including the footage of Cantona’s infamous karate kick to the chest of a heckler, which temporarily derailed Cantona’s career. For sports fans, especially those worshipful of King Eric, this is pure cinematic cocaine, neatly chopped out, electrifying at first although too much of it could leave you feeling jaded and jangly.

Indeed, Cantona services fans generously with plenty of great clips of our hero making extraordinary goals and passes, remonstrating with authorities and, best of all, taking his shirt off in his younger years. But there are sizable nits that could be picked. For starters, the early years and his family background are covered with but a cursory montage, as are his post-Man U years apart from a few fun clips from some of the films he made as an actor, including that time he played himself in Ken Loach’s Looking for Eric.

In the film’s press notes, the directors state that they interviewed many more people than the six mentioned above, but decided to cut out the others because “Eric’s personality didn’t suit an ensemble cast,” and chose to prioritize his voice. Of course, that’s their prerogative, and with a character as strong as Cantona it makes sense in a way.

But it also skews the final product in a more hagiographic direction and arguably excessively minimizes the importance of teamwork in Cantona’s and Man U’s success. Contemporaries such as Ryan Giggs, Roy Keane, Lee Sharpe and Andy Cole, for example, were as integral to the well-oiled machinery of the team, tightly synched with Cantona, as Beckham ever was — but perhaps they don’t have the same cachet as Becks, especially for audiences abroad. In fact, in many ways Beckham’s star ascended as Cantona’s waned, and it would only take a few judicious edits and exaggerations to make their story look like All About Eve, but with jockstraps and unibrows.

But what Cantona elects to do, it does well. The star of the show, turning 60 on May 24 this year, has mellowed with age only marginally and for the most part, like Edith Piaf, il ne regrette rien. The film opens with a quotation from the poem ‘L’Héautontimorouménos’ (The Self-Tormentor) from Charles Baudelaire’s collection Les fleurs du mal, about how the speaker is both ”the wound and the knife…the blow and the cheek”; that dualism is stressed throughout, with Cantona referring to himself as both an angel and a devil, opinions he expresses while sitting in a church no less.

In less lofty terms, that means his game instincts and ball control were sublime, a once-in-a-generation talent. But his temper and arrogance were equally unparalleled, constantly leading him to argue with authority figures, from referees to his own managers. He changed clubs an extraordinary seven times between 1983 and 1992 before finally settling down with Man U. Similarly, he lost the captaincy of the French national team for Euro 96 because of the kung fu incident that banned him from playing, and he was never selected again for the World Cup’s French squad.

But those who love him are loyal to the bone, and express that here, even if in a choked-up, inarticulate-straight-male way, as is the case with famously taciturn Scotsman Ferguson. What’s even more interesting is the way Ferguson talks about the game as if it were spectacle, and how he knew in 1992 that he needed someone “with some flare, a sparkle that lights up a stage,” and that’s what he found in Cantona. It isn’t all about strike rates and penalty kicks; sparkle is important too. That charisma is abundantly on display here, as it is in the new interviews, where Cantona’s intelligence and integrity are just as palpable as his rage.

As if to cool that fire, classical selections are used to bed large swathes of the film, with electronic grooves that hark back to the heyday of acid house from Paul Hartnoll, co-founder of British rave scenesters Orbital. Even the rhythms of the editing feel very 1990s, which no doubt help this appeal to older millennial dads nostalgic for their wilder years.