Snap Movie Apostrophes: L’auberge espagnole

You were not, despite my lame attempt at a pun, about a Spanish eggplant. Instead, you were precisely the sort of movie I would have gotten all bajigitty over a decade ago but now must sneer at, because your rampant implicit hatred for the EU is kind of distasteful.

With its flags identifying the nation of origin (or something similar) of the actors qua actors—as in, before we’re introduced to their German, Danish, etc. characters—you immediately mobilise a certain attachment to national identity. That, itself, is not the end of the world, but you’re self-consciously within the EU: rent prices are given in pesetas as well as euros, and Xavier himself is angling for a job within the massive bureaucracy the EU promises to bring. Still, the idea of a cultural hodge-podge is tantalisingly cosmopolitan, and that might be all post-national and delightful.

But you insist on mucking it all up. Xavier leaves his job at the end, and runs off to write a book, declaring himself to be the universal unimpeded subject—he is French, Danish, etc. He speaks all the languages. But this positioning in the center comes at an extreme cost: the reassertion of class power.

What really bothered me about you was how you’re a movie about, essentially, rich people pretending to be poor. Though there are complaints about high rents in Barcelona, none of the roommates seems to have a job. Perhaps Erasmus is paying for it all, but I doubt it—the state is presented as a bureaucratic mess, not a benevolent donor; Xavier can fly to Paris on a whim, even only for a day. Despite his avowed hatred of hippies like his mother, he is a hippie himself—slacking off, going clubbing, pursuing some sort of self-actualization that is his class privilege (note how quickly the movie becomes less about his studies and more about his spiritual growth). And he even mobilises that red herring of left politics—accusations of racism—when Anne-So complains about how “dirty” Barcelona is. It’s not a racial question, but an economic question, you schmuck. Xavier, you’re an economist, in theory–can’t you see that?

Anyway, this isn’t about your protagonist; it’s about you. And you create this little liberal capitalist wonderland where everyone is able to pursue their own individual goals, while working under the guise of universalising humanity, thereby persistently writing the poor out of the script. This is why William, the brother, gets accepted in the end. He’s a dipshit boor, but he has the same class privilege. They can teach him not to make Nazi jokes; they can’t teach him to be rich.

Now, it’s not surprising that a movie reaffirms a capitalist politics. Why this movie is pernicious is because it masks its hierarchies and structure under the fantasy of libertine egalitarianism. In one direction, it suggests that egalitarianism is possible under the economic structures of today. From the other side, it suggests that today is all you need! We don’t need a politics of the left; we don’t need the collectivisationist feints of the orderly, boring, color-coördinated EU; we just need to hang out together, get drunk, and we’ll realise a unifed globe!

(Suddenly, my theory that Audrey Tautou has a good nose for crypto-reactionary films makes a bit more sense)