ABSTRACT
L’Auberge espagnole/The Spanish Apartment is a French-Spanish coproduction written and directed by the French director Cédric Klapisch. It tells the lighthearted story of Xavier (Romain Duris), a rather straitlaced, callow French student who spends a year in Barcelona as part of the Erasmus university exchange program and ends up sharing an apartment with a motley group of fellow Erasmus students drawn from across Europe. Incorporating dialogue in French, Spanish, English, Catalan, Danish, German and Italian, The Spanish Apartment proposes a number of manifestations of European identity that gradually emerge through the comic interplay among cultural comparison, cliché and gentle stereotype. As Xavier discovers, the similarities that exist among young adults from different European countries far outweigh the differences. Part romantic comedy, part sitcom, part social drama, The Spanish Apartment recounts a familiar ‘youth’ ritual — the move from university to ‘the real world’, the often complicated personal, romantic and cultural encounters that ensue, and the moral uncertainties that characterize that transition between adolescence and adulthood.
