The Spanish Inn

"I'm like Europe, I'm a real mess!"

The Spanish Inn (L'Auberge espagnole) is a film by Cédric Klapisch released in 2002. The title refers to a French phrase: an "auberge espagnole" is a messy place.

Xavier is a Parisian graduate student who needs to earn a degree in Spanish in order to get a cushy job at the Finance Ministry. He applies to the ERASMUS exchange program, and arrives in Barcelona. With no place to go, he crashes on the sofa of a couple he met in the plane, but eventually finds an apartment, a cramped and messy flat shared by a bunch of foreign students.

Each of them comes from a different country—Wendy is British, Alessandro is Italian, Isabelle is Belgian, Lars is Danish, Soledad is Spanish and Tobias is German—making the apartment a microcosm of the EU.

A sequel, The Russian Dolls, was made in 2005, and shows how Xavier and his former flatmates have turned out five years later.

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Tropes used in The Spanish Inn include:

• Annoying Younger Sibling: Wendy's brother William is a loutish oaf who gets on everyone's nerves. In the sequel he is somewhat better.
• Attractive Bent Gender: Xavier in the sequel, sort of. He does have a REALLY hairy chest though.
• Babies Make Everything Better: Averted. One day Lars's ex-girlfriend shows up at the flat with her baby and tells him he's the father. It doesn't bring them back together, and sends him into a deep funk.
• Better as Friends: Isabelle and Xavier.

Isabelle: "Pity you aren't a girl!"

• Non Sequitur Scene: the scene when Xavier goes in to get his brain scanned.
• Bilingual Bonus: Understanding French and Spanish helps.
  • If you can't tell the difference between Spanish and Catalan, the scene where Isabelle asks to her professor to teach in Spanish rather than Catalan may be, well, weird.
• Billing Displacement: on the American DVD, Audrey Tautou is front and center and her name is the only one that appears. This is despite the fact that Martine appears for only about 10 minutes or so in the entirety of the film. Presumably this is because Audrey Tautou is the most familiar French actress to American audiences
• Butch Lesbian: Isabelle.
• The Cameo: Lars, Soledad, Alessandro, and Tobias in the sequel.
• The Couch
• The Ditz: Anne-Sophie.
• Dream Sequence: When Xavier goes in for a brain scan.
• Embarrassing Cover Up: William rescues his sister by pretending he was the one in bed with her lover when her regular boyfriend shows up without notice.
• Everybody Smokes: Pretty much. And spliffs at least as often as cigarettes, too.
• Everyone Is Single: Averted, but considering how casually they cheat on their respective significant others, they may as well be.
• Friends Rent Control: Averted. It's precisely because none of them could afford to live on their own that the students share the flat.
• Friendship Moment: All the tenants scramble to prevent Wendy's boyfriend from finding out she's in bed with another guy.
• Fun with Acronyms: ERASMUS stands for European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students. Not that you learn this from the film...
  • Truth in Television: seriously, no one knows it's an acronym in the first place, at least in England. All my friends have done ERASMUS placements and none of us knew it was an acronym. The fact that its sister schemes are called Leonardo and Comenius make it likely that the 'awesome European figures' was the primary concern, so it's really a backronym
  • Especially since it's actually the European COMMUNITY Scheme, not "region", making the acronym even more stretched- Eu Ropean council Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students
• Fun with Foreign Languages
• Gratuitous English: It's a French film set in Spain, and only about three of the main characters are from an English speaking country, yet English is the most used language in the film.
  • Truth in Television: In Europe, pretty much everyone's second language is English. Since they all speak Spanish, they could all use that (and they sometimes do, such as when Tobias wants to talk to Wendy without William knowing about it), but maybe it's just easier to use English.
    • This is only true for the ERASMUS community in Spain and a little mount of the young population. Try going to Spain without speaking any Spanish. Good luck!
  • Slightly unfair to call it 'gratuitous' considering they all seem to speak very good English, but they're not great at Spanish (at least at the beginning, when they were getting to know each other). It's more "practical English" at first, and then merely not bothering to change the common language later.
• Hey It's That Girl: Martine is played by Audrey Tautou, who is better known to international audiences for playing Amelie.
  • This is actually to the point of Billing Displacement, as on the American DVD cover she is featured prominently and is the only actor in the film whose name appears on the cover, but she's in a grand total of maybe ten minutes of the film.
• If It's You It's Okay: Averted, when Isabelle laments the fact that Xavier is male.
• Inherently Funny Words: Urquinaona.
• I Should Write a Book About This: Xavier ends up pursuing a writer's career, and his first book is about his time in Barcelona.
• The Ladette: Isabelle.
• Last Girl Wins: Xavier met her before several other girlfriends of his, but the last girl he starts a relationship with in Russian Dolls" is Wendy, and she's the one he ends up with
• Les Yay: Isabelle gives Xavier a tutorial in female pleasure by getting it on with her girlfriend in front of him.
• Love Triangle: Xavier has an affair with Anne-Sophie.
• Market-Based Title: Depending on where you are in the world, you may know the film as L'auberge espagnole, The Spanish Apartment, Europudding or Pot Luck.
• Meet Cute: Jean-Michel and Anne-Sophie met cute, and predictably, they never tire of telling everyone how they met.
• Narrator: Xavier provides the voiceover.
• National Stereotypes: Lampshaded by William, who observes that the German student's side of the room is much tidier than the Italian student's side. "You Germans, you like order, don't you?"
  • Later on in the same scene he explicitly references Adolf Hitler. This is about the point where everyone in the apartment but Wendy want to throw him out on his ass
  • Also present with the way everyone treats Bruce, the hunky American guitar player that Wendy starts messy around with, whom Xavier explicitly refers to as a "stupid American," even though we're never given any reason to think he's less intelligent than any of the others (granted, they're graduate students and he's a busker, but still).
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: Signing up for the ERASMUS program involves dealing with uncooperative secretaries and filling out loads of paperwork.
• Planning with Props: Jean-Pierre, a neurosurgeon, explains to Xavier the workings of the human brain by using food items as props.
• Scooby Stack: Happens when the tenants want to find out how the negociation between Xavier and the landlord is going, but don't dare come out of Wendy's room where they're all hiding.
• Shout-Out: Jean-Michel, when Xavier asks him if he can crash at his place until he finds steady accommodation, references Asterix in Iberia by answering "Between Gauls, we've got to help each other out!"
• Slice of Life: There isn't really a plot, the story is simply about Xavier's year in Barcelona.
• Split Screen: When the various characters rush back to the flat in order to get Wendy out of trouble.
• Title Drop: Xavier looks up the dictionary definition of auberge espagnole. "As with literature, so with a Spanish inn: you will only find in it what you brought in the first place."
• Toros Y Flamenco: Averted; this Spain looks decidedly genuine and un-Hollywoodish. But Isabelle does take flamenco classes.
  • William's stereotypical beliefs about Spain put him on the wrong foot with everyone the first night he crashes, particularly Soledad
• Trash of the Titans: Everyone in the flat thinks that cleaning up is someone else's job, except Wendy, who goes understandably crazy over it.
• True Companions: the residents of the apartment by the end of the movie. In the sequel they've drifted apart, but they're still obviously thrilled to see each other at William's wedding.
• Tsundere: Martine.
  • Wendy has some elements of this as well.
• Your Cheating Heart: Most prominently Anne-Sophie, but Wendy as well.