Language and Gender in the Movie L’auberge Espagnole

Introduction

L'auberge Espagnole (literally: The Spanish Apartment), is the story about a 25-year-old man, Xavier, who leaves France to further study Economics in a Spanish city, Barcelona. Following his arrival, he is soon thrust into a cultural melting pot when he moves into an apartment with different international students. An Italian, an English girl, a boy from Denmark, a young girl from Belgium, a German and a girl from Tarragona all join him in a series of cosmopolitan adventures and comic tribulations that serve as an initiation to life.

Characters are the soul in movies. Every word interlocutor brings and merely a simple facial expression they deliver can delicately represent every crucial communicative message the director of movie exactly wants to tell the audience. With the rich multi-cultural background in the movie of L’auberge espagnole, I am going to describe and analyze the overall motive among men and women conversational habits. Also, the cross-gender communication skills are discussed in a functional approach.

Intrepretation of Metamessage

Tannen Deborah, an expert of language and gender, suggests men and women interpret message differently. The underlying reason is that they decode hidden meaning of a message by sender base on cross-cultural communication. Here in the movie, since the departure of Xavier with Martine, his girlfriend in Paris, their separation stirs up conflicts frequently because how they perceive message is not the same.

Utterance Message Metamessage

Martine, ‘You just don’t wanna talk with me’ Martine assumes Xavier no longer wants to talk with her. She feels discontented of being ignored by Xavier and wants Xavier to understand her anger.
Xavier ‘No…there’re five people here. Let’s not argue. This is ridiculous! Xavier explains why he cannot chat so long on phone. He does not wish to further argue on phone with Martine.

Independence VS Intimacy

(1) Eye contact
According to Tannen’s research, she suggests at each age, female face each other and have a kind of direct gaze that they create. They keep looking at each other the whole time that they are talking to. For male, they look around the room rather than directly at each other in chatting. However, the theory is partially valid applied in this movie. In conversations between women, they mostly look at each other. More, for conversations between either man-to-man or man-to-woman, men still hold a constantly direct eye contact. It can be explained as an intercultural difference in face-to-face encounters. As in European and North American culture, they treat eye contact as a sign of honesty. Directly gazing each other represents politeness and trust to interlocutors.

(2) Body Alignment
Tannen also mentions female likes to align body face to face while male likes to align themselves either at angles or parallel, as for sign of intimacy and independence for women and men respectively. Here we can conclude the theory is quite applicable when observing different scenarios.

Public Talk VS Private Talk

Though all humans need both private and public talk, women tend to focus on the former and men on later. When Wendy’s brother come to Barcelona and spent a week living in the apartment, he is particularly interested in sharing his life in London with everyone whom he had not met before. However, when Anne, the wife from Xavier’s friend, is asked to tell Xavier how she falls in love with his husband, she feels embarrassed and thinks this private talk ought to take place between couple themselves yet not to any unfamiliar people. According to Tannen Deborah, this can be explained as men feel more comfortable to start a conversation among more participants in the dialogue. The less well men know the people, the higher status they can maintain in hierarchical social order. However, it is vice versa for women because the function of private talk is to establish connections and display similarities.

Difference VS Sameness

Men like to express their views unlike others to show their significant difference and women usually display sameness to match experiences. In the movie, when the girl newly moves to the apartment, she shares her experience of having the same stuff in the room with Xavier. Later, she asks Xavier if he also has the record from Ali Farka Toure or not. She intends to give a message of “We’re close and the same” and give Xavier a feeling that she is equally friendly to live with in this community. Another scene shows the exactly opposite view from men is when Xavier mentioning the beach. Xavier tells Martine he is going to visit a beach in Barcelona. Martine thinks he will go to the same beach as before, even she hears a different beach name. Xavier insists the one he is going to is “different” and is “another”. He also interprets that Martine is trying to render his own experience insignificant. In fact, the way he strongly emphasizes the “difference” means he wants to maintain the uniqueness of his happening.

Problem-solving VS Understanding

When Martine expresses her anger of Xavier’s broken promise, Xavier offers a solution of taking a cheaper flight. His takes the role of problem-solver at that moment to reassure Martine does not feel that bad. However, what Martine expects is the understanding from her boyfriend instead of advice.

Xavier: Hello, my love.
Martine: You said you’d come! Fuck!
Xavier: No wait, uh…I don’t have the money. I’m sorry. I’m broke…How about if you come here first? Take a cheaper flight, is it ok?
Martine: I was broke too! But I still managed to come…You don’t give a damn!
Xavier: I do give a damn!
Martine: No, you don’t! You make promises, blow them off…And for my birthday, it’s disgusting! You don’t understand me!

Conclusion

Analyzing deeply into the movie L’auberge Espagnole, I find language, culture and communication these three vital elements are closely related across male-female interaction. When women speak and hear a language of connection and intimacy, while men speak and hear a language of status and independence, then communication between these two genders takes place cross-culturally in terms of the four main aspects discussed. However misunderstandings arise because of different style in communication, I believe the key of understanding certainly prior to merely learning through the differences in conversations because we need to build the rapport to sustain a harmonious dialogue box instead of criticisms and dissatisfactions.