L'Auberge Espagnole (Pot Luck) 2002

People seem to think highly of this French euro-pudding of a film, but perhaps its pictures of student life rang more bells with them than they did with me.  Rising actor Romain Duris has had some good press of late, but he plays such a little shit in this film that his story left me cold.  Advised to spend a year studying in Spain to further his ambitions for a government post, he goes to lovely Barcelona, leaving behind his hippy mom and his long-term squeeze, Audrey Tatou.  We are shown the troubles he has finding somewhere suitable to live before ending up sharing with a mixed bunch of sexes, orientations, and nationalities.  (Much of the dialogue is per force in broken English, since the flatmates have varying fluency in Spanish and little knowledge of the other tongues).   He begins an affair with the lonely wife of a doctor who has been kind to him, while still stringing Tatou along, and generally embraces the carefree student life; apart some complaints about the lectures being in Catalan rather than Castilian, his school hours are just about irrelevant to the rather thin plot.  However on his return to France and the coveted job, he runs away from any such adult responsibility to embrace the "freedom" of a writer's life, one way of recreating his easygoing student days.  I felt like shouting "grow up".  The only thing in  favour of this movie from my point of view is that it ran 20 minutes shorter than it said on the DVD case!