text: Cedric Klapisch's movie L'AUBERGE ESPAGNOLE is easy, breezy charm wrapped in nostalgia for our younger years and attractive youths. At its core, it's the feature-length presentation of the long-running MTV reality soap opera known as "The Real World" in which, as its motto goes: "This is the 'true story' of seven strangers picked to live in a house and have their lives taped... so watch what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real." This is exactly what happens -- minus the cameras planted at every minuscule corner of the house in Barcelona, Spain, where Xavier (Romain Duris) comes to stay, having to learn Spanish to fill into his job's requirements. An outsider in many ways, he slowly forms a camaraderie with his house-mates who come from all corners of Europe except America... this is a movie in which the only American shown is an unlikable character with whom Wendy (the adorable Kelly Reilly) is having an affair with ("Only for sex," she confesses, since she has her own boyfriend who makes a late but dazed appearance.). Throughout his stay there, he tries to maintain a long-distance relationship with his girlfriend played by Audrey Tautou while he begins a tentative flirtation with the wife of the owner of the Spanish house where he is staying at and gets some advice from a lesbian house-mate (Cecile de France) as to how to seduce a woman. A sweet little feature that presents a moment in time that twenty-somethings will never see again, L'AUBERGE ESPAGNOLE is forgettable fun containing within itself the threshold into the "real world" experienced through Xavier's eyes.