A dollop of Europudding

Cedric Klapisch's Franco-Spanish comedy is set mainly in Barcelona among flat-sharing students of various nations. A truer Europudding film it would be hard to find.

It begins promisingly, in satirical Tatiesque mood, with all the bureaucratic red-tape that Xavier (Romain Duris) has to cut through before he can start his business-studies in Spain.

Once there, though, the film needs just this binding element, for it's all over the place and finishes up nowhere. Xavier's budding affair with a married woman, which looks about to undo the malechauvinist knots that the husband has tied his spouse in, comes on-screen, then goes off it for 10 minutes, returns for another assignation, and eventually is dropped as suddenly as if the actress had met with an accident.

Far too much time is spent with Xavier's boring flatmates, each of whom is a fagged-out national stereotype: the French boy himself is a tender lover; the Italian is disorganised; the German is too well regulated and takes offence at mention of Hitler; and the English guy who drops in is a boor who boozes, vomits and moons. Klapisch was surer-footed in his Parisian comedy, When the Cat's Away.

Multinationalism gives minimalist returns.

Pot Luck (L'Auberge Espagnole)
Cert: 15