THEY had to wait until almost halfway through the film before he appeared but suddenly a whispering hissed around the cinema. That lithe dark figure striding into a smalltown bar, "Oui, c'est lui, c'est Cantona.
Eric Cantona, looking and sounding remarkably like Eric Cantona, plays a cameo role in Le Bonheur est dans le Pre (Happiness is in the Meadow), a comedy by director Etienne Chatiliez. The bad boy of Manchester United took on the part when he had time on his hands last year, banned from the professional game for nine months after kicking Crystal Palace fan Matthew Simmons.
In the film, the 29-year-old Cantona plays a virile country lad and part-time rugby player who has made a farm girl pregnant. The part involves a lot of eating and drinking around the farmhouse table, when he is not revving his little red car around the country lanes. Speaking in his familiar singsong (and incomprehensible) Marseilles accent, Cantona makes an animal impact, showing off bronzed muscles in jeans and sleeveless T-shirts.
His footballing brother Joel, who plays for Eric's former team of Olympique Marseilles, also appears as another lusty local.
In between takes, the two brothers apparently played long games of petanque, keeping well away from the town of Auch, where the film was shot, because they were mobbed by fans as soon as they appeared.
Released in December, Le Bonheur est dans le Prep has had huge success in France, and was the most popular film in the Paris region last month. Whether this was due to the presence of French soccer's anti-hero is hard to tell, for some reviews did not even mention Cantona's guest spot. Director Etienne Chatiliez has a record of savage social-comment hits, such as Tatie Danielle and La Vie Est une Longue Fleuve Tranquille (Life is a Long Calm River). But this film is one of a genre currently all the rage among French audiences: vulgar buddy movies where the guys get drunk together and discuss sex, defecation, ears and cash, while women are either hysterical or nymphomaniacs or both.
A frustrated businessman tired of the trappings of his empty life is wrongly identified by a schmaltzy TV show of being the runaway husband who abandoned a wife and two daughters 26 years earlier.
Encouraged by a friend, he pretends to be the man from the past, and is seduced by the rural idyll in which his new-found foie-gras farming family lives (in the real town of Condom, by the way, though this is not a joke in France). Other current hits in these belly-laugh comedies include Les Anges Gardiens (Guardian Angels) and Les Trois Freres (Three Brothers).
Eric Cantona may no longer play football in France but he's forever popping up on television, advertising razor blades or sportswear, arguing against racism or appearing as a fashion model. But the trench have mixed feelings about their enfant terrible. Long before he started misbehaving on English football pitches, he was already a trouble-maker in France.
His long list of misdemeanours includes punching his own team's goalkeeper and leaving him with a black eye, calling each member in turn of a disciplinary committee "Idiot" which led to a doubling of his punishment, swearing at the French national coach, being suspended from Olympique Marseilles after he kicked a ball into the crowd and threw his shirt at the referee when he was substituted, and setting his dogs on a journalist who came to his house to try to interview him.
His fans see him as an unpredictable genius, but his pretensions as a painter and philosopher (a book of his rambling pensees was a best-seller) are often ridiculed by his critics. French hackles were inevitably raised in his defence against his English-imposed prison sentence (later overturned) for attacking Matthew Simmons, but French football officials privately sighed with relief that Eric was no longer their problem.
Curiously, his former boss at Olympique Marseilles, disgraced businessman Bernard Tapie, is the latest French figure to turn his hand to film acting. Tapie, now bankrupt though he remains an MEP, is the star of a new movie by Claude Lelouch, currently being filmed in utmost secrecy in Paris. He plays a successful businessman (with mistress) who befriends a down-and-out when they both attend the same cancer clinic (all the ingredients for a French satire.
Because of its unconventional casting, the film is promised as l'evenement of the autumn. What can we expect next from French cinema?
Guest appearances from Francois Mitterrand's daughter Mazarine, perhaps, or Jean-Marie Le Pen? They would make a welcome change from the ubiquitous Gerard Depardieu at any rate.