The Spanish Apartment (2003)
Runtime: 2 hrs 2 mins
Rising director Cédric Klapisch uses a kinetic high-definition digital camera that plays with time, rhythm and space to reflect a year of wild parties, tumultuous love affairs, inspired friendships, sudden heartaches and unexpected connections that add up to a new view of the future. The film is accompanied by a global-music soundtrack that includes tracks from Radiohead, Daft Punk and Ali Farka Toure, along with flamenco, Afro-pop and even Chopin.
Set against the dynamism of one of Europe's hippest cities, Barcelona, L’AUBERGE ESPAGNOLE follows the fate of 25-year-old economics student Xavier (Romain Duris) who journeys there as part of the popular inter-European exchange program "Erasmus," named after the traveling Dutch scholar of the Renaissance. -- © Fox Searchlight [Less]
Genre: Comedies
Starring: Romain Duris, Audrey Tautou, Judith Godreche, Kelly Reilly
Screenwriter: Cedric Klapisch
Producer: Bruno Levy
Composer: Louis de Francesco
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
The rare film that makes you not only wish you could crawl inside it, indeed live it, but that such a thing might have been possible even for ugly Americans like me if only I'd taken my junior year abroad.
[Its] cheery characters are ultimately stuck wending their way through wackily contrived scenarios fit for a sitcom.
L'auberge espagnole or The Spanish apartment is a lovable, cozy mess just like its architectural setting.
...not a difficult movie to criticize, [but] a hard movie not to like.
Marx remarked that all great historical events happen twice — first as tragedy, then as farce. If he’d seen [this film]...he might have concluded tragedy recurs as reality TV.
European Union navel-gazing plus braying youth worship equals L' Auberge Espagnol.
There isn't enough story or character development to make this into the breathtaking escapade Klapisch seems to have aspired to.
The episodic L’auberge Espangnole is like a younger and European version of Friends.
Não funciona apenas como retrato da globalização e do choque de culturas, mas também como a jornada pessoal de um jovem rumo à definição de sua vida
Yet another example of writer/director Klapisch's way of finding fresh new insights within the most mundane of circumstances.
Klapisch has imbued the film with such energy and such insight that his themes linger on the palate, like the aftertaste of a fine French or Spanish or Italian or German or whatever wine.
A film whose limitations are the same as its appeal: It's a bauble.
Since for most of us, it's too late to pack a suitcase, spend a year in beautiful Barcelona, and fall so easily in and out of love, "L'Auberge Espagnole" is a lovely cinematic diversion.
Crams a whole season of Real World fights, flings, cover-ups and send-off parties into one bloated pastry of a film.
Even when I was in grad school, I'd have found this film excruciatingly long, juvenile, self-indulgent and implausible.
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by: JWilhelm 5/8/03


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