‘Cantona’ review: Energetic doc explores the man behind football’s enigmatic icon

Dirs: Ben Nicholas, David Tryhorn. UK. 2026. 115mins

Former French footballer Eric Cantona is made for the screen: he’s brooding, proud, eloquent, comfortable with silence and has an air of danger born from his on-pitch volatility. This energetic and generous documentary leans into all those qualities while charting Cantona’s colourful playing career through extended interviews with Cantona, his parents and former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson. It revolves around his five seasons with Man United in the 1990s – including his infamous 1995 kung-fu kick on a fan at Selhurst Park during a match against Crystal Palace – and looks back to his Marseille childhood as well as forward to his current life as an actor, singer and painter. 

As a portrait of the man, it’s selective but not so much as to feel shallow

Cantona has long had an appeal beyond the sports world, but those who care about his footballing story will find the most to enjoy in this spirited doc with its beat-heavy, rowdy score from Orbital’s co-founder Paul Hartnoll. Its portrait of a mercurial talent searching for a father figure could broaden its appeal, as could the current vogue for all things 1990s. UK and French audiences should get a special kick from its rich archive TV footage. The film’s world premiere as a Cannes Special Screening, followed by its UK premiere at Sheffield DocFest, should help find it a theatrical release or home on a streaming platform or broadcaster. Support from Cantona himself would surely liven up any release strategy. 

Cantona opens with music resembling a submarine siren going off and with a big quote splashed on screen in black capital letters against a bright red background: ‘I AM THE WOUND AND THE KNIFE!’ You could be forgiven for mistaking the film for the latest from French cinema provocateur Gaspar Noé. But it turns out to be the beginning of a quote from the Baudelaire poem ‘The Self-Tormenter’. An extended clip from French TV in 2001 then gives colour to that moniker, as we see Cantona ranting and raving on a sports programme as he looks back on a L’Équipe headline calling his 1995 attack on a fan ‘Unforgivable’. He argues out of nowhere that what was actually unforgivable was the treatment of Catholics in the 12th and 13 centuries before he declares in French, ‘I piss on the Pope’s arse!’

After that, the film’s spirited dash through his pre-Man United footballing career, with its tantrums and fallouts, feels relatively tame. The meat of the film is his time in Manchester, with chapters titled after his five seasons at the club, and that’s where the film plays its strongest hand – Alex Ferguson. The filmmakers give the man who managed the club for 26 years almost as much airtime as Cantona (who speaks in both French and English) and he proves a wise, likeable interviewee.

Ferguson is also the centre of the film’s strongest theme: Cantona’s embrace and rejection of father figures. Another interviewee is Guy Roux, now 87, who took teenage Cantona under his wing at Auxerre. Cantona’s parents try their best to make sense of their son (‘He never tried to fix himself’). Cantona shows love for them all. He reserves his ire for Bernard Tapie, former chairman of Marseille, who was accused of match-fixing. Time is not a softener.

Archive footage provides the bulk of the film’s runtime alongside new interviews and establishing shots of Cantona swimming, riding his motorbike or making earthy paintings in the Provençal landscape. His personal life is off-limits aside from references to his parents’ influence. His pursuits after retiring from football in 1997 at 30 are dealt with incidentally rather than as the main thrust of the story, with him intermittently watching clips from his films including Ken Loach’s Looking For Eric. That film showed Cantona’s willingness to examine himself with lingering pride and a wry smile. That same attitude runs through this doc. Any regrets about that kung-fu kick after 30 years of reflection? ‘I should have kicked him harder.’

As for storytelling, Cantona stumbles a little in its later stages because of its subject’s abrupt and anticlimactic retirement from football. There’s no decline. No new drama after the kung-fu kick incident and its fallout. As a portrait of the man, it’s selective but not so much as to feel shallow. It fleshes out his qualities and weaknesses while preserving much of the enigma. Which is exactly what you imagine Cantona himself would want.