Part romantic comedy, part sitcom, part social drama, L’Auberge espagnole (The Spanish Apartment) recounts a familiar ‘youth’ ritual – the move from university to ‘the real world’, the often complicated personal, romantic and cultural encounters that ensue, and the moral uncertainties that characterize that key biological and physiological developmental stage between adolescence and adulthood. French director Cédric Klapisch showcases the extraordinary colour and beauty of Barcelona’s architecture, and places his hero Xavier at the heart of this smartly written film, which makes a series of wry observations on educational exchange programmes, multi-culturalism, and the direction European youth might take in the twenty-first century. This book addresses the topic of Europe’s youth generation, paying particular attention to the ways in which the film depicts the transition from adolescence to adulthood as allegory for the experiences of European society as it moves through periods of readjustment towards uncertain futures. It also looks into the ecosystem of contemporary French cinema, the Erasmus programme and its influence on youth experience, and identity politics in relation to ‘nationhood’ and ‘European-ness’. The book also examines the two sequels to the film – Russian Dolls (2005) and Chinese Puzzle (2013) – and how the complications faced by the main characters across the trilogy suggest that the move to adulthood is a never-ending process of growing up and reaching a level of self-actualization.

"The many-leveled action of The Spanish Inn takes place within the mind of the narrator, a fascinating and complex mind which draws together the tenuous threads of the past, present and future. To achieve his purpose, French novelist Jean Louis Bergonzo has made use of many of the techniques and artifices of the “new novel” form, but has adapted them brilliantly to his own ends. We first discover the narrator in a bare corridor, dressed enigmatically in striped pajamas, and it is from this fixed location that his story is launched. It is in this same corridor that the novel ends, after a succession of adventures in which reality and fantasy meet and intertwine. Writing from Paris in The New York Times, Marc Slonin said of The Spanish Inn that “it contains all the features of avant-garde French fiction: the language forms the vehicle of the plot, and its rhythm is a means of hypnotic enchantment .... The story unfolds on several levels, one of them quite simple: the marital tribulations of a teacher abandoned by his wife. But around this trivial core revolve obsessional visions, neurotic complexes as Well as erotic feats and picaresque adventures .... “Alienation, incarceration, escape - the main themes of the novel - are revealed through grotesque scenes, sexual phantasma and pictures of death and destruction. The author plays with the inversion of time and space, introduces repressed desires as everyday occurrences and stresses the banality of manic delusions. The contrast between the imaginative flights of his descriptions and the lucidity of his matter-of-fact, realistic details is one of the attractions of The Spanish Inn, and its humor, irony, and sense of the burlesque make it captivating. . . reading.”" --cover pages [2.3].