Pot Luck

Xavier (Duris) spends his final year as a student at a college in Barcelona. He's melancholy about the girl he left behind, anxious about the married woman he takes up with in Spain - familiar stuff, though attractively presented (shot on high-definition video). But the emphasis is on life at the flat Xavier shares with seven other students, each from a different European country: learning to tolerate one another's foibles, helping each other in a crisis, etc. In this metaphor it's no surprise that Wendy the Brit goes to bed with an American and Xavier the Frenchman is enraged about it. But this is an astonishingly good-natured movie, and when Xavier takes stock of what he's learned only hardcore nationalists will fail to be moved by his passionate assertion of a European identity - 'Je suis français... espagnol... anglais... italien...'