French comedy smash a curious phenomenon

By Kirk Honeycutt

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Nothing really explains why "Welcome to the Sticks" (Bienvenue chez les ch'tis) has become the biggest box office smash in French history.

Perhaps the French are just in the mood to laugh at themselves. The film, which played at Los Angeles' City of Lights, City of Angels film festival, reveals itself to be a lighthearted, feel-good comedy that plays it both ways: It makes fun of regional prejudices yet still gets comic mileage out of rube characters and a nearly impenetrable dialect.

Those linguistic gags might limit playdates outside France. However, the English subtitles shown here did a solid job of letting non-French speakers in on the joke.

Co-written and directed by popular comic Dany Boon, the film centers on a postal manager (Kad Merad) banished from sunny Provence to a bleak town "up north." All southerners consider that region uninhabitable by any civilized person because of bad weather and a backward culture. Even a traffic cop refuses to issue a citation in sympathy for the poor man.

The locals do indeed speak an incomprehensible dialect (albeit one the actors allow to come and go). But the manager soon overcomes his initial antipathy thanks to a lovelorn mailman (Boon) and a collection of "colorful" rustics who befriend him. Because of marital tensions, though, he continues to tell his wife (Zoe Felix) back home that he is miserable. Then she journeys north to see for herself.

Comic action and sight gags mix nicely with the linguistic humor. The film's points about the utter stupidity of cliches concerning other people are well made without being didactic. But none of that solves the mystery of a box office haul of almost $200 million.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter