"Auberge espagnole"? Maybe the best US equivalent would be "potluck supper," which sounds both yucky and boring; the movie's not that bad, but it could have been better. Our protagonist, Xavier, is a bland graduate student who's inexplicably rude to his mother (he scorns her as a "baba"—a hippie) but works his father's old-boy connections to get a plum government job. It's a familiar storyline, like "Doc Martin" or "Local Hero," where the clueless careerist gets in touch with his inner niño (cheel, bairn
) in a magical place like Barcelona, Cornwall or the Highlands. The potluck roommates don't get much screen time, but there's a comic-relief Englishman who does an unfunny reprise of Basil Fawltey's "don't say anything about the war" routine, and we see way too much of him. In the best scene, a feisty Belgian lesbian (Cécile de France—not her first Belgian lesbian role, btw!) teaches our hero how to handle a woman; Audrey Tatou's pretty much wasted as his needy, petulant girlfriend, but Juliette Godrèche is good, in an underwritten role, as the woman who gets handled. It's one of those movies where the hero sits down at the end and starts to write the story you've just been told
but Proust it ain't. Maybe we're too old for this sort of thing, but I doubt there's anybody who gets all dewy-eyed about the EU these days. Cute cast, great locations (¡Gaudí!), a little dated but still watchable; just don't expect too much.
Review of The Spanish Apartment
