Pot Luck (Cédric Klapisch, 2002): France, Spain
Reviewed by Lauren Sousa. Viewed online.
How a caterpillar becomes a butterfly was long a mystery; though children learn in grade school about the conversion, it is still magical when a newly beautiful creature emerges, the period between disappearance into the chrysalis and ecdysis therefrom still seems a momentary transition, unnecessarily elongated by time.
A time-lapse of the transition is, from the outside, relatively boring; despite a defined beginning and end, the middle is monotonous.
Cédric Klapisch’s film, L’auberge Espangole (also known as Pot Luck,Europudding, and The Spanish Apartment, among others) is little more than such a time-lapse, replacing a caterpillar with a somewhat average, indecisive French college student.
Instead of staying outside the chrysalis, though, Klapisch lets the butterfly talk, but the resulting narrative, rarely sensible, leaves audiences confused rather than awed.
Near the beginning of the film, when protagonist Xavier (Romain Duris) must cut through endless red tape to spend a year abroad in Spain as a student of economics, Klapisch employs a nine-way split-screen, which serves as an adequate metaphor for the many directions his film attempts to stretch itself.
Although Xavier is ostensibly the star of the show, the titular apartment houses seven other students. Though not all receive individual storylines, their sheer number makes them intimidating; even attentive audiences will not be able to keep track of them all. Further, they are scarcely developed; Klapisch trades in stereotypes to characterize them, lending the film a quickly-written, simplistic quality. Further, their large numbers seem unnecessary for the plot. Two or three would have been sufficient; this number is just distracting. They explain their presence as “The rent is not very cheap, so there have to be very many of us,” but their real purpose appears to be to make Xavier seem more mature and likeable, but they end up making him look more artificial in contrast to the others’ guilelessness. For example, his adult charms dissuade the landlord from evicting the whole gang for their childish disorganization; a few scenes later he joins the pot-smoking they were trying that demonstrated their irresponsibility.
Nothing about this film is particularly enlightening or beautiful; it tries to do so much that it fails to do anything well. For whatever reason – portraying cultural diversity? Confusing audiences? – the multicultural crowd speaks several languages, each person struggling with those besides their own. The film’s lack of faith to any particular perspective, despite Xavier’s occasional voiceover, adds to its patched-together quality. Though there is certainly a time and place to explore multiple storylines, that exercise is best conducted above a cohesive tone or concept; this film cripples itself by intending to adhere to Xavier’s perspective. By choosing a non-diegetic, neutral narrator, the film’s multiple storylines could have been linked better. Instead, one roommate’s brother swoops in to stereotype everyone, and, thanks to the shallow script, he’s right.
Worst of all, the movie’s end feels inconclusive. Despite a few small conflicts, the film’s abundance of entirely pointless scenes of everyday life and sex leaves little screen time for character development, so Xavier’s final decision to eschew a lifetime of bureaucracy to become a writer feels strangely divorced from his year away, as though he would have chosen the path anyway, but had no subject matter until the film’s end.
Further, most of the actors’ performances are merely effective; though none of them reach true artistry, Judith Godrèche comes the closest as Anne-Sophie, the repressed young wife of a doctor, Jean-Michel. Her affair with Xavier takes up the most screen time of any single story, with her excellent perceptiveness of the tone of her scenes winning her a well-deserved Cèsar nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. Her subservience to her husband despite her obvious distaste for his absent pushiness displays the best emotional performance of the film by far, while all the other actors seem capable of only hurt, drunk, and annoyed facial expressions.
Godrèche’s acting is supplemented by the excellent writing, of course. Kaplish seems to have poured most of his energy into this one story, providing it with a realistic, full range of emotions and allowing the plot to progress naturally over time.
In the end, L’auberge Espagnole is intended as a coming-of-age tale, a genre which basically relies on character development, but how the main character travels emotionally from point A to point B is entirely eschewed from the script; the audience is intended to believe that his experience in Spain somehow has changed him. Kaplish’s poor attempt to demonstrate growth happens only in the second-to-last scene, the night before his departure, when the audience learns that Xavier has become friends with his apartment mates; however, he confessed from the beginning to loving the place’s atmosphere, rendering the possibly promising scene pure filler. Returning home apparently no different from when he departed, any transition falls flat because the viewer never gets to watch him change, which could have been aided by better writing.
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