The giddy, naïve excitement of student travel is given a buoyant if shallow tribute by L'Auberge Espagnole, director Cedric Klapisch's latest multi-character trifle. The film's greatest strength is also its most nagging weakness: Klapisch's dogged insistence on adhering to his hero's first-person point-of-view. As played by Romain Duris, said hero Xavier comes off as little more than a bland, selfish cipher, treating routine, age-old, post-adolescent trials and tribulations -- his first real breakup, his first sexual fling, his first encounters with other Europeans -- as if he's the only person who's ever experienced them. Of course, it's one thing for a lead character to be a navel-gazer; it's another for a filmmaker to practice the same habit. Klapisch's movie contains the kind of clichéd narration ("I always wanted to be a writer"), stereotypical supporting characters (the free-spirited lesbian who teaches Xavier how to make love to a woman), and florid, would-be New Wave technique (split screens, freeze-frames, sped-up footage) that back up Xavier's solipsism at every turn. It's like being subjected to a slide show from an undergrad who won't quit blathering on about how his year in Spain changed his life. Not unlike a frothy advertisement for study abroad programs, L'Auberge Espagnole will compel more than a few post-teens to send in their passport applications, but the rest of its audience will be somewhat less inspired.