Taken from Charles Baudelaire’s poem The Flowers of Evil, the famous Charles Baudelaire quote that opens Cantona — “I am the scar and the knife / I am the blow and the cheek / I am the limb and the wheel / The victim and the executioner” — would seem overkill in a documentary about just about any athlete other than Eric Cantona. But the opening lines of David Tryhorn and Ben Nicolas’ glossy, mesmerizing portrait of the legendary French soccer player and cultural icon strike just the right note for a man who enjoys a reputation as the sport’s brutal poet, whose legacy rests equally on his athleticism, his volatile personality, and his enduringly eccentric quotability.
Cantona’s own words weren’t always so lyrical. Immediately after that stilted intro, the doctor cuts to a famously unrepentant television interview he gave on French sports channel L’Equipe. In it, he relativized the incident of violence against fans that had earned him an eight-month suspension from soccer, and told journalists who were following him about it: “I’m pissed off their asses.” This is Cantona’s dual nature, part sage and part thug, descended from Marseille’s proud working class, and “Cantona” does not intend to interfere with that myth. It’s entertaining, but mostly superficial, as it tells the ups and downs of his career (it’s debatable which are which) but respectfully distances itself from his inner self, and given Cantona’s own still-fascinating presence as a talking head and storyteller, it’s a movie that might make for a new movie for fans.
A wealth of new interview material with Cantona, alongside a number of A-list colleagues and fans, including former Manchester United team-mate David Beckham and manager Sir Alex Ferguson, expresses ‘Cantona’s’ biggest selling point, and it’s a significant one. Following its premiere in the Special Screening section of the Cannes Film Festival, the British production looks set for an easy path to distribution and broadcast. While it won’t necessarily be experienced on the big screen, it would be a good fit for a streaming platform with a wide international reach.
In fact, Trihorn and Nicolas have appeared in two documentaries about major football figures released on Netflix: 2021’s Pele and 2022’s The Figo Affair: The Transfer That Changed Football. (Another film about Vinnie Jones is in the works.) Neither would have made it to Cannes, and Cantona isn’t particularly ambitious in scope or form, but the level of French interest in the new subject is just that – after all, he played for six French clubs and the country’s national team during his career. But, understandably, the filmmakers are most interested in his five-season tenure at Manchester United, which was marked by career-defining victories and scandals.
In a rather mundane fashion made dynamic by Andrew Hewitt’s deft dribble editing style, Trihorn and Nicholas zip through the career trajectory that brought Cantona to Manchester as an already famous 26-year-old prodigy. In particular, the relentless introductory montage traverses between archival and current interviews, match footage, famous soundbites, home videos, and snippets of Cantona’s films, establishing his status as an icon. Music choices, meanwhile, range from solid horror-style synths (courtesy of electronic musician Paul Hartnall) to glorious Mozart symphonies.
Once the film reaches its main area of interest, it settles into more traditional topical storytelling, but even the new interview footage, shot against backdrops ranging from the interior of a cathedral to the artist’s canvas-studded studio, shows off its grandeur. There is little new insight or information about Cantona’s time at Manchester United. He quickly became the club’s golden boy, scoring 64 league goals during his time there, before being suspended for a fan who taunted him with his infamous kung fu-style tirade, before making a successful return for a single season before abruptly retiring from the sport altogether.
But Cantona’s frail, still-spirited personality lends color to his Wikipedia-style summary, and fans will be thrilled by his current defiant stance against assault. “He should have kicked it harder because he deserved it.” (Suppose the victim turns out to have committed xenophobic abuse, and viewers can decide for themselves whether the punishment fits the crime, but the film feels primarily on Stryker’s side.) Of the other interviewees, it’s no surprise that the slightly plaintive-spoken Ferguson has the most to say, and his continued paternal loyalty to Cantona is quite touching. However, as always, the Frenchman will focus his full attention here.
“Cantona” briefly touches on its subject’s post-football career as an actor and all-around French VIP, with some amusing clips of his humorous and very meta self-portrait in Ken Loach’s 2009 comedy “Looking for Eric” (key line: “I’m not a man, I’m Cantona”) and the sight of him colliding with the world in period costume opposite Cate Blanchett in the film. “Elizabeth.”
I wish there was a little more insight into this second celebrity incarnation and his personal life. His parents are good interview subjects, partaking of their son’s more zany qualities with tacit pride, but marriage and parenthood are clearly off the table, which is fair enough. But we get to see select shots of contemporary artist Cantona attacking the canvas with abstract expressionist fervor in the dry olive groves of his country estate in Provence, which very well confirms the legend of “greater than sport.”
