Directed by
Dany Boon
106 minutes
Rated M
Reviewed by
Sharon Hurst
Welcome To The Sticks
Synopsis: Phillipe Abrams (Kad Merad) is a post office manager in a city in the south of France. His wife Julie (Zoe Felix) suffers depression and Philippe think he should transfer to the Riviera to cheer her up. But after trying to scam a relocation by pretending to be handicapped, he is punished by his superiors by being sent to a town called Bergues, near the Belgian border. This part of France is seen by southerners as “the sticks”, where the weather is freezing and the people are hard-drinking, boorish, and speak an incomprehensible dialect. Julie refuses to live up there and believes Phillipe must be having a ghastly time. On his fortnightly visits home and to keep her happy he goes along with her belief, when in reality he has discovered that life up north is totally different to what he expected.Whether you like this hit comedy or not will probably depend upon your style of humour, and whether you have an interest in strange dialects. For me, I was initially thinking “oh no, another over-acted French comedy”, but I must say as the film progressed I became more and more engaged with the characters, and began to laugh out loud in parts.
Director Boon also plays one of the main characters, Antoine, a postman who lives at home with an overbearing mother, moons after his lost love Annabelle (Anne Marivin), plays the carillon in the local church, and waxes between sobriety and total drunkenness as he accepts the invitations of locals to have a drink as he delivers their mail. Boon in fact comes from that very region of France and bemoans the prejudice which much of France holds towards his region, which is indeed more impoverished and desperate than the rest of the country. What he shows here in his affectionate look at his neighbours is a people full of warmth, humour and above all, generosity.
The language and customs of the people are revealed in a highly amusing manner. The language thing is actually quite complex; the locals have a way of talking that is known as Shti’mi, in which “s” is often substituted with “sh”, making them seem to lisp, and many common words are replaced by unrelated dialect, so that southerners and northerners can barely comprehend each other. This makes for many jokes in the film, and must have also made a nightmare for the sub-titler, to whose credit it all works well! However viewers with no intrinsic interest in the funny side of language may find it bemusing rather than amusing
Merad and Boon act terrifically well together. They have a rapport that makes the friendship seem authentic, and at times their near slapstick shenanigans are reminiscent of the best of farce and physical comedy.
When Phillippe arrives he is told “Visitors to the north cry twice – once when they arrive and once when they leave”. This of course sets the very predictable arc of the story, and yet there are enough cute, delightful and downright silly scenes and incidents, make Welcome To The Sticks very acceptable and entertaining viewing.
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