|
COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
C?dric Klapisch, the talented director of "When the Cat's Away,"wrote his new picture, "L'Auberge Espagnole,"in less than two weeks, cast it on the fly in different European cities, and shot it in Barcelona with a lightweight digital camera. "L'Auberge Espagnole"is a discursive, sketchbook movie about a twenty-five-year-old Parisian graduate student, Xavier (Romain Duris), who goes to Spain on an exchange program and lives with a polyglot mix of students in a cramped walkup apartment. Lousy with books, magazines, clothes, and a variety of unspeakable leftovers, rudely crammed into the fridge, the apartment is, understandably, a mess. Xavier's father is a businessman, his mother a hippie; he's a handsome young man, but conventional and rather withdrawn, and not quite sure who he is. Xavier is in suspension--all seven of the Barcelona apartment dwellers are in suspension, studying and dawdling in delicious bohemian squalor before taking the government and corporate jobs that will, as the movie suggests, bring the bourgeois prison walls down around them. "L'Auberge Espagnole"is vignettish and offhand, but it's extremely pleasant, and it suggests what can be done with lightweight equipment and a loose-limbed approach to the right subject. Such things as Xavier's r?sum? and various Web sites pop onto the screen, eagerly overlapping one another. Episodes set in bureaucratic Paris are speeded...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
