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.
