Lifted from his poem “Flowers of Evil,” the Charles Baudelaire quote that opens “Cantona” — “I am the wound and the knife/I am the blow and the cheek/I am the limbs and the wheel/Victim and executioner” — would seem like overkill in a documentary about pretty much any sporting figure besides Eric Cantona. At the outset of David Tryhorn and Ben Nicholas‘ glossy, enthralled portrait of the legendary French soccer player and culture-spanning icon, however, it strikes exactly the right note for the man who revels in his reputation as the brute poet of the sport, and whose legacy rests on equal parts athletic prowess, volatile personality and enduring, eccentric quotability.
Not that Cantona’s own words have always been quite so lyrical. Shortly after that lofty intro, the doc cuts to the famously unrepentant TV interview he gave on France’s “L’Equipe” sports channel, in which he relativized an incident of violence against a fan that landed him an eight-month ban from soccer, and addressed the journalists hounding him over it: “I piss on their asses.” Such is the duality of Cantona, equal parts sage and thug, of proudly working-class Marseille stock, and “Cantona” isn’t about to interfere with that mythos. Enjoyable but mostly surface-level as it recounts the highs or lows (it’s sometimes debatable which is which) of his career while maintaining a respectfully awed distance from his inner life, it’s a film for fans that could mint some new ones — given Cantona’s own still-irresistible presence as a talking head and storyteller.
Generous new interview material with Cantona — along with a host of A-list colleagues and admirers, including former Manchester United teammate David Beckham and manager Sir Alex Ferguson — thus reps the chief selling point of “Cantona,” and it’s a significant one. Following its Cannes premiere in the festival’s Special Screenings section, this British production can expect an easy road to distribution and broadcast: Not necessarily a big-screen experience, it would sit well on a streaming platform with wide international reach.
Indeed, Tryhorn and Nicholas are coming off a pair of Netflix-released documentaries about major soccer figures, 2021’s “Pélé” and 2022’s “The Figo Affair: The Transfer That Changed Football.” (Another, about Vinnie Jones, is in the works.) Neither would have got near Cannes, and “Cantona” isn’t notably more ambitious in scope or form, but such is France’s level of regard for the new film’s subject — who, after all, played for the country’s national team along with six French clubs in the course of his career. The filmmakers, however, are understandably most interested in his five-season tenure at Manchester United, where his most career-defining triumphs and scandals unfolded.
In fairly prosaic fashion made dynamic by Andrew Hewitt’s deftly dribbling editing style, Tryhorn and Nicholas race through the career markers that got Cantona to Manchester as an already celebrated 26-year-old prodigy: In particular, a relentless introductory montage establishes his icon status by crosscutting between archival and present-day interviews, match footage, famous soundbites, home video and fragments of Cantona’s film career, while music selections swerve from stabby horror-style synths (courtesy of electronic musician Paul Hartnoll) to glorious Mozart symphonies.
Once the film reaches its chief area of interest, it settles into a more conventional talking-heads affair — though even the new interview footage, shot against backdrops ranging from a cathedral interior to an artist’s canvas-strewn studio, gesture towards grandeur. There’s little new insight or information offered on Cantona’s Manchester United years — which saw the player swiftly become the club’s golden boy, scoring 64 league goals in his time there, before his notorious kung-fu-style assault on a heckling fan that landed him the ban, followed by a successful single-season comeback, and a shock retirement from the sport altogether.
But Cantona’s bearish, still-spirited personality brings color to the Wikipedia-style summary, and fans will get a thrill from his defiant current stance on the assault: “I should have kicked him even harder, because he deserved it.” (Let it be said that the victim was found to have been dishing out xenophobic abuse: Viewers can decide for themselves if the punishment fit the crime, but the film feels largely in the striker’s corner.) Of the other interviewees, a somewhat wistful-sounding Ferguson unsurprisingly has the most to say, and his continued paternalistic loyalty to Cantona is rather touching. Still, the Frenchman pulls all the focus here, as is his wont.
“Cantona” touches briefly on its subject’s post-soccer career as an actor and all-purpose French VIP, with several amusing clips from his good-humored, highly meta self-portrayal in Ken Loach’s 2009 comedy “Looking for Eric” (key line: “I am not a man, I am Cantona”) and the worlds-colliding sight of him in period garb opposite Cate Blanchett in “Elizabeth.”
It would be nice to have a little more detailed reflection on this second celebrity incarnation, and anything at all on his private life. His parents are good value as interviewees, shrugging off their son’s more ornery qualities with tacit pride, but marriage and parenthood are clearly off the table, and fair enough. We are treated, however, to choice shots of Cantona the contemporary artist, attacking canvases with abstract-expressionist fervor in the parched olive groves of his Provençal country estate, which support the “bigger than sport” lore very nicely indeed.
