Waiting for a mystery movie to begin is rather like being on a blind date. You are left alone in the dark as endless possibilities flicker through your mind. Are they your type? Are you their type? How is the evening going to pan out? Will there be a happy ending or will you be left feeling like you’ve wasted another two hours of your life?
Just like a blind date, you can try to piece out what your movie will look like by using all of the information available. At two hours exactly it was too short to be a Megan Fox and at a rating of 15 too young to be a Tarantino. Could it be something you never even considered watching before?
Now that’s exciting, brave even, stepping outside of your comfort zone. This could be an exotic experience not to be sniffed at. They may even speak in different accent or, God forbid, a different language.
Surely we want to be challenged by a potential partner? We want them to shake us up, demolish our cosy little life and open our eyes to the chance of a beautiful relationship? Can they teach us something new?
If the majority of the crowd who left to get their money back as soon as “Looking for Eric” materialised from the darkness are to go by, then the answer is a resounding no.
There’s nothing wrong with marrying your school sweetheart and living happily ever after but once in a while you need to spice things up. If those people had given “Eric” half a chance they would have found themselves thoroughly entertained, emotionally stretched and, most importantly, more likely to support a low budget British movie in the future.
Ken Loach’s film centres on the breakdown of Eric, an obsessive Manchester United fan and postman who walked out on the love of his life Lily when she gave birth to their daughter Sam thirty years earlier. With a second failed marriage that has left him with two unruly step-sons, Eric seems on the verge of suicide.
Taken at face value you could be forgiven that this has got “bad date” written all over it. You don’t need that kind of complication in your life! Or do you?
With Alan Clarke dead of cancer in 1990 and Mike Leigh slightly too condescending in his depiction of the working class, Ken Loach, for many years, was the last social realist standing. Now that he has been joined by Shane Meadows, Penny Woolcock and Andrea Arnold, Britain has a vibrant, viable and credible-issue led cinema.
For over a decade, we have been sucked and seduced into a Richard Curtis middle-class hell, populated by fops and cockney stereotypes with hardly a black person in sight. These movies sell in America and that’s fine, but there’s only so much soul a nation can afford to lose.
Nick James, the editor of Sight and Sound, summed it up when commenting on Meadows’ “This is England”:
“What will people outside of Northern Europe make of the regalia of 1980s skinheads from the Midlands? Hopefully they will be intrigued. ‘This Is England’ made me realise, too, that some British films are at last doing what Sight and Sound has campaigned for; reflecting aspects of British life again and maybe suffering the consequences of being harder to sell abroad.”
We have to start ‘intriguing’ our own audiences first and not just the metropolitan ones. Loach’s film is genuinely touching in its warm depiction of male working-class friendship, a subject rendered almost extinct by relentless media negativity aimed at anyone living on a council estate culminating in the national embarrassment felt by many towards the Shannon Mathews case. So how do we stop audiences from walking out, or else not even considering going to see a British film in the first place?
Using Manchester United legend Eric Cantona is a double-edged sword for Loach. Football divides the country at the best of times and United despite their enormous success are hated by most. However, Cantona represents a time before what his teammate Roy Keane called the “prawn sandwich brigade” took over. His dope-fuelled conversations with his namesake are about unity, solidarity and teamwork, key Loachian themes. When asked by Eric what was his best footballing moment was, Cantona simply replies, ‘It was a pass’.
When the narrative takes a surprisingly dark turn in the final third of the film it is this working class ethos that saves the day and finally gives Eric the peace and redemption he richly deserves. What a shame so many movie-goers didn’t even give it a chance to breathe.
Like Eric does from Cantona we could learn a lot from our French friends about how to play as a team when it comes to cinema. The French government vigorously promotes an indigenous cinema as a viable alternative to Hollywood hegemony. A combination of co-productions, interest-free loans subject to script approval, and tax benefits all contribute to an auteur -based cinema.
The French government promote cinema as an art form and a vital part of French culture through education programmes, film schools and polices aimed to increase cinema attendance outside the main cities and towns. Protectionism has its detractors, but until Britain joins up its funding and education, and gets over the theatre communities snobbery regarding film, great movies like “Looking for Eric” will continue to be stood up and left alone holding a bunch of flowers and a box of chocolates.