2002 French movie feels like a cinematic balm for COVID-19 times
In 2002, a little film called “L’Auberge Espagnole” — also released as “The Spanish Apartment” or “Pot Luck” in some Anglophone countries — trundled out of France, played for a few weeks in the U.S. the following year, earned generally favorable reviews (it’s at 76 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, 65 on Metacritic), and then ascended to that great video store in the sky.
The film, while a hit in France that spawned two sequels, has been largely forgotten in the U.S., but the sweetly engaging comedic drama from director Cédric Klapisch is more memorable than the $4 million it managed to scrape up during its American run might indicate. Standing apart from so many other, more substantial and turbulent movies of the day — “Elephant,” “28 Days Later,” “City of God” among them — the ebullient “L’Auberge Espagnole” is the apotheosis of a late-’90sborn cultural optimism that now seems quaint and naive but, in our era of pandemic panic and enforced isolation, whimsically nostalgic and oddly comforting. It’s like stumbling across a favorite childhood toy.
On its face, the film tells the simple tale of Xavier (Romain Duris), an uptight French grad student in economics who moves to Barcelona to continue his studies and finds his worldview widened and his life enriched by a rambunctious but warmhearted crew of roommates hailing from England, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Germany and Denmark. He comes out of the experience a man forever changed, his eyes widened to a new way of looking at the world.
Xavier’s story, of course, is really the embodiment of the era’s pan-European dream, where borders crumble to dust and cultural exchange is the newly minted currency. That was the promise of the European Union, coming along at a time when walls were falling everywhere: the Chilean military regime fell apart in 1990; the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991; South African apartheid followed three years later; and author Francis Fukuyama made headlines with “The End of History and the Last Man,” a 1992 book of political philosophy that promoted the thesis that freemarket-based, Western liberal democracy would be “the final form of human government.”
The Love Parade, a huge German outdoor dance party that at its peak attracted upwards of a million people from all over an increasingly porous Europe and the planet, was something of an avatar for this new sensibility. Appropriately, it even spawned Love Parades across borders and oceans — in Sydney, Santiago, San Francisco and Cape Town. Similarly, the Festival in the Desert in the African country of Mali attracted adventurous concertgoers from all over Europe and North America, including Robert Plant and Jimmy Buffett, to see Tuareg tribesmen playing a version of African-Americaninspired blues and rock. The world was growing smaller by the minute.
To add a technological cherry on top of this cultural sundae, Silicon Valley was going to put all of this brave new, interactive world at our fingertips. We were all Xavier. We were all going to have super-cool, international roommates. Late-stage capitalism was going to be fun!
But the world and realpolitik had other plans.
9/11. Iraq. Afghanistan. The Great Recession. Syria. ISIS. Brexit.
The Love Parade was permanently canceled in the summer of 2010 after 21 people died and 500 were injured in a crowd crush. Festival in the Desert came to an abrupt halt after the 2012 event due to security issues and fears of terrorism.
In the wake of China’s rise, Putin’s Russia and a surplus of newly empowered strongmen, Fukuyama has walked back much of his optimism about the triumph of liberal democracy. “Twenty-five years ago, I didn’t have a sense or a theory about how democracies can go backward,” he told the Washington Post in 2018. “And I think they clearly can.”
And, then, the internet showed its dark side.
Now, COVID-19 is shredding what’s left of the dream. When the leader of a traditionally welcoming country like New Zealand declares, “We will not have open borders for the rest of the world for a long time to come,” as prime minister Jacinda Ardern said earlier this month, it’s obvious we’re a long way from Xavier’s idyllic, freewheeling, open-door Barcelona.
There’s a splash of magical realism near the start of “L’Auberge Espagnole” where newly arrived Xavier, on a crowded Spanish sidewalk, spies his more knowing self from a year in the future walking in his direction. It’s a way of telling us — and him — that everything is going to absolutely be OK.
But what would old Xavier have thought if instead he’d bumped into 2020 Xavier, all masked, gloved and anxiously socially distant? That would have made for a far more provocative and prophetic, but far less celebratory, film. And, right now, the world could use a little less 2020 and a bit more 2002.