Spanish pudding, Russian dolls

Four years ago, L'Auberge Espagnol was one of my favorite movies. It was trite and cheesy and fun, and dubbed the "Friends" of the EU, but I liked it. The sequel, Les Poupées Russes, is now playing Stateside.

Much like two similar (but far, far superior) films, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, the Cedric Klapisch movies follow the lives of twentysomethings as they're just becoming independent, and then follows up with them years later as they've been dealt blows. Both first films are happy and idealistic and focus on identity and philosophy and changing the world, and the sequels are slightly cynical and bittersweet and focus almost exclusively on finding love. (Both sequels take place in Paris, I might add.)

Les Poupées Russes didn't profile all the characters from L'Auberge Espagnol, just three or four. It also alternated wildly from comedy of errors to tragedy of errors... but maybe that's one of the points Klapisch was trying to make. I get the feeling he didn't know how funny or how serious to make it, and so the result is a kind of schizophrenic montage that left me wanting more details about the characters' lives. Instead, their stories and emotions are glossed over in favor of visual antics, and the overall plot summary is reduced to "Oh, okay, so those two end up hooking up after all." Even the final lines, where the narrator explains the "Russian doll" metaphor, are clichéd. And one of the underlying themes of globalization was largely ignored, whereas national-identity woes were pretty central to the Econ students' lives in the original film.

I was disappointed.

And the soundtrack wasn't as good as the original.