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L'Auberge Espagnole review
:. Director: Cédric Klapisch
:. Starring: Gilbert Melki, Grégoire Colin
:. Running Time: 2:02
:. Year: 2002
:. Country: France
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I'd been home from Barcelona a week when I accepted an invitation to watch Cedric Klapisch's L'Auberge Espagnole. It proved a somewhat masochistic attempt at conquering post-holiday depression, as the city is so resplendent in this film it makes you pine for the heady energy of its streets. The carnival of scooters, cable cars, graffitied shutters and late-night drinking is wonderfully rendered, and it's the hedonism and cosmopolitan thrust that takes place in old yet ultra-modern European cities like Barcelona that is the real star in this successful Franco-Spanish picture.
However, once the furore dies down, it becomes apparent that L'Auberge Espagnole has tried too hard to do the fashionable thing and has fairly squandered the opportunity to properly scrutinise a fascinating strata of transient European life, which is a shame, as the story itself has potential. In order to embark on a dull but promising career with the Ministry, Parisian Economics student Xavier (Romain Duris) requires a crash course in Spanish, and so hitches himself to the Erasmus scheme to spend a year in Barcelona, where the action centres on an apartment he shares with a cross-section of European youth. The freedom he's afforded there puts the prospect of his bland office future in a vastly different perspective. While Xavier wrestles weakly with this dilemma, the friendships and friction in the apartment hint that there's a more interesting, if well hidden, premise of the movie at work: what is Europe and (how) are we making it succeed? Is there such a thing as European identity?
In practise, national identity comes primarily to the fore in the context of other national identities. When you say what you are, you really say how you are different. In the context of a single nation, the focus tends to be on regional, political or sexual differences. For the purposes of the microcosmic EU of this Barcelona apartment, the identity, for example, of Xavier's closest friend Isabelle (in a role that won Cecile de France a Cesar award for best newcomer) gravitates between 'the lesbian' and 'the Belgian.' Whether this rescues her from the potential trap of sexual identity or effaces her individuality in a different way is an open question. In the perfect instance of course, she would finally be just 'Isabelle', and at the close of the film that's very nearly what she is (and if you're concerned that I've moved away from the main character so soon, that's because it's frighteningly easy to do). The film doesn't in fact shy away from the supposed pitfalls of living in a multinational environment, it just describes them in a ham-fisted fashion. Xavier experiences a mild existential crisis induced by a fear that his (national) identity is being erased. "I have lost my mother tongue!" he declares anxiously. Presumably when he loses French, he also loses France, and with it possibly himself. (Pity he's not a lesbian, you might think, as does Isabelle, though I fear it's not identity he lacks, but character).
Interestingly though, it's commonly understood that language moulds ideas, and not the other way around. That is, we interpret the world through the words we hold for existing concepts, and new concepts are identified and interpreted in relation to these, or not at all. It's a rich and potentially fascinating avenue of enquiry for art to consider (what kind of change might one undergo in forsaking a first language for a combination of others?) but again and again the easy laughs and middle-of-the-road, almost rom-com blueprint to which the film unnecessarily commits itself restricts much of this discussion, and any sense of depth is sold to us elsewhere by Xavier's long silences and aimless voice-overs. While Xavier and the EU both struggle with notions of unity and difference, this film partially illustrates how, in a real and significant way, Europe is in fact already well into the process of constructing itself, away from the glare of bureaucracy, in multi-national spaces such as that inhabited by these students. As young Europeans it can only benefit us to think about this. Klapisch, however, might prefer that we worry whether Xavier will reunite with his girlfriend Martine (played competently, if blandly, by Audrey Tautou of Amelie fame). He didn't even have to leave Paris for a story like that. Interesting hints towards the politics of nation and language do surface throughout L'Auberge Espagnole, but they do just that; surface.
Politics aside, the artistry in the film is itself hit and miss. While the nightclub sequence, notoriously hard to film convincingly, is really quite exciting and beautiful, Xavier's hallucinatory journey inside his own brain falls flat, as does the boringly televisual use of split-screen. (Look, we're on the phone! And you can see both of us! Ho-hum). The editing should have been much more ruthless as it feels like every idea has made it to the final cut, and the heavy-handed transcription of subtitles doesn't do the film any favours. In one sequence Martine gives a wordlessly melancholy and exasperated sigh following a failed attempt at love-making, which is transcribed as "What a major drag!" It's worth mentioning too that the soundtrack comes over as obvious and a little dated. Radiohead's "No Surprises" is played ad nauseum, a strange choice for a film which aims to be ultra-contemporary, though Radiohead are, it's true, the last word in Gen-X music, and in many ways L'Auberge Espagnole is a standard Gen-X/quarter-life-crisis text (Xavier's Mum is even a hippie). The listlessness of mid-20s life, however, has been better examined elsewhere, and Klapisch is no Douglas Coupland.
If the film limps, it's not purely because it stops short of adequately addressing the identity politics to which it consistently refers. It has as much to do with the fact that we are peculiarly numb to the impact of a story of this kind, swamped as we have been by reality TV shows that work on this same format (Big Brother and MTV's Real World in particular). The randomness of the group, the clashes of personality, the trauma of close living are familiar weekly staples to us now. It's genuinely a tough call to try and bring anything new to it in fiction that we can't measure against fact. L'Auberge Espagnole's chief appeal will doubtless be to an audience slightly younger than the cast, who have yet to embark on such adventures as University, Erasmus schemes or European travels. As for the rest, jaded by the inevitable come-downs that follow these exhilarating events, I guess they'll enjoy the club scene, and little else.
Greg Thorpe
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