Eric Cantona's garlicky performance dominates Ken Loach's fantasy, writes DONALD CLARKE.

THIS BEGUILING new release from Ken Loach is, it’s safe to say, the first of the director’s films that could, with only a few cosmetic changes, be translated into a Jim Carrey comedy. Paul Laverty’s script offers exactly the sort of high concept such enterprises demand – a Mancunian postman takes advice from an imagined Eric Cantona on how to win back his estranged wife – and the picture ends up by tying all its loose ends together in the same neat bow.

Okay, no American sports star can boast the combination of glamour and shamanism that makes Cantona such a charismatic figure. Looking for Magic Johnson? Hardly. Looking for OJ? Certainly not. I didn't say it would make a goodJim Carrey film.

The picture focuses its attentions on the troubled, panicky figure of Eric Bishop. Played with uncomplicated sincerity by Steve Evets (briefly a member of The Fall, would you believe?), Eric has just emerged from hospital after semi-deliberately speeding his car towards the wrong end of a busy roundabout. His troubles are many: he still loves his estranged first wife Lily (Stephanie Bishop); his stepchildren from a subsequent relationship are treating his house like a drug den; the current, commercialised Manchester United no longer seems like the club he loved.

Eric is, however, not without supporters. His good-natured pals at the post office try their best to improve his mood, and his grown-up daughter appears to be making surreptitious efforts to bring him back with Lily.

And, of course, he also has quasi-supernatural assistance from the Khalil Gibran of modern football. One evening, after the postie has smoked a joint, the other Eric appears before him to offer characteristically gnomic advice. Remember you are part of a team. Never give up. Those sorts of things.

In most directors' hands, such a scenario would lead only towards the cheesiest sections of Cheesetown. But, working from a script by Paul Laverty, his frequent collaborator, Loach manages to impose impressive degrees of grit on proceedings. Like Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, Looking for Ericdemonstrates that even the clunkiest scenario can gain a kind of transcendence when filmed in naturalistic style using properly committed actors.

Yet, for all the overlapping dialogue and handheld camerawork, Looking for Ericis undeniably a work of fantasy. After all, could a figure as delightfully absurd as Eric Cantona ever have walked the Earth? No Frenchman would ever dare to be quite so French. No philosopher would rely so heavily on the Monty Python book of meaningless aphorisms.

It is to Cantona’s credit that he exhibits such a full understanding of his own iconography. What he does here is not acting exactly – much of his garlicky dialogue is unintelligible – but he does a rather brilliant job of isolating the essence of Cantona and allowing it to illuminate a potentially glum scenario. It’s a small role, but it dominates the film.

Looking for Eric drifts into a less excusable school of fantasy in the final act when Eric and his pals unite to resist a drug dealer who is threatening the hero’s stepson. As you might expect from such reliably humanist film-makers, the denouement has stirring things to say about the power of working-class solidarity and the resilience of the misused spirit. Unfortunately, the final, cosy tidying away of all Eric’s traumas strains credibility to breaking point and beyond. If the film is to be believed – and Loach’s films do ask to be believed – love really can conquer all, people genuinely are capable of change and even the foulest villainy will yield to righteous men.

Maybe all this is true, but such messages may feel more at home in the Jim Carrey version.

Directed by Ken Loach. Starring Steve Evets, Eric Cantona, John Henshaw, Stephanie Bishop, Gerard Kearns, Lucy-Jo Hudson 15A cert, gen release, 116 min