Xavier (Roman Duris), a young Frenchman studying economics, is offered a job provided he learns Spanish. He moves into a large apartment in the old part of Barcelona, along with a cheerful bunch of young people from all over Europe; Wendy (Kelly Reilly) is a sweet English girl who gets saddled with most of the housework, and there are also guys from Italy, Germany and Denmark, plus girls from Belgium and even one from Spain. It's a cheerful, chaotic, multi-cultural environment.
This comedy from Cedric Klapisch, the director of the very amiable When The Cat's Away, is a modest winner. Also known in English as Euro Pudding, it starts cleverly by presenting fragmented scenes from the film to come, and identifying the actors with their national flags, and it's full of funny jokes about Euro bureaucracy and cultural sensitivity (Xavier's teacher insists on conducting the economics course in Catalan, the language of Barcelona, not Castillian, the official language of Spain.) Most of all, the film very successfully captures the feeling of what it's like to be young, to be sharing accommodation with people your own age – and to be indulging in love affairs, suffering disappointments, discovering soul mates – all the important things of youth. It's a charmer.
