Spanish Fantasy
by Anne Gilbert

How many modern students dream of taking off to some foreign country for a year, setting up house with some equally free-spirited foreigners, and immersing themselves in a life of international revelry? Isn’t this, after all, the drive behind countless work-and study-abroad programs the world over? It is certainly the quixotic ideal of L’Auberge Espagnole, the new film from writer-director Cédric Klapisch.

L’Auberge is a very personal film, a first-person account narrated by, and almost exclusively about, Xavier (the appropriately bland and endearing Romain Duris), a reticent, straight-laced French student who moves to Barcelona for a year to study economics. He is not moving to enact his own romantic fantasy of international living; in fact, he heads south, over the objections of his hippie mother and harping, neurotic girlfriend (Audrey Tautou), largely because he is assured a corporate job if he comes back fluent in Spanish and carrying a Master’s Degree. The allure of the strange land soon proves to be an irresistible force, however, and the film follows Xavier’s personal changes as he embraces a life of hip bohemian bliss.

The film proudly displays all of the standard, clichéd characteristics of living abroad: Xavier shares a small, grimy apartment with seven fellow students, each from a different European country, where the multinational existence is marked by bickering, carefully labeled items in the refrigerator, and a sign by the phone, identifying how to answer it in a variety of languages. His long-distance relationship with his girlfriend is threatened by an increasing fondness for a lesbian classmate and by the frequent attention he pays to a young, newly married woman he met on the plane. He manages to fully immerse himself in the foreign culture, becoming a regular at a local bar, gaining familiarity with his exotic surroundings to the point of enjoying a sense of ownership, and generally relegating his studies to the back burner as he becomes thoroughly devoted to the process of “life learning.”

The picture has plenty of charm. The banter shifts from English to French to Spanish, and the visuals are often just as playful -- for instance the “I am here” icon that follows Xavier as he first wanders through Barcelona looking for his new home, or the hilariously odd and paranoid dream sequence that comes late in the film. L’Auberge Espagnole brilliantly depicts the appeal and allure of a contemporary utopian fantasy.

Unfortunately, as films enacting fantasies are wont to be, the movie is rather self-indulgent. Xavier has a distressing tendency to bemoan his lot in life, and it is an attitude that grates. After all, he is in the process of living out a life of idealized cosmopolitan squalor, so it is hard to muster any sympathy for the difficulties of his life as he lounges on the sun-drenched balconies of Barcelona. Similarly, the film does little to elicit much sympathy for the breakdown of Xavier’s relationship with his girlfriend, considering she is depicted as a rigid, unforgiving shrew. In addition, while the film’s approach to the narrative as an unfolding series of adventures in one young man’s life is often quirky and clever, it can also be listless and meandering. Because they are woefully underused, the supporting cast of characters are played largely as plot devices and stereotypes of their mother countries.

Near the end of the film, in one of the funniest sequences, the roommates band together to help conceal the infidelity of one of the residents, but the camaraderie and caring comes a bit too late for it to really round out the picture. Additionally, the loose ends left all over the place are laughable, so that the entire film comes off as a disjointed series of moments that never really lead anywhere. It was probably a technique that was meant to show something of “real life,” but in the end, it just feels like stories start, find they have nowhere to go, and simply peter out. For all of its faults, however, L’Auberge Espagnole is worth a look -- it's one of the rare films that avoids generic conventions and is lighthearted and happy without being saccharine.


©2003 Anne Gilbert
CineScene