moviereview - Welcome to the Sticks

WELCOME TO THE STICKS

	When a postal manager from Provence is 'sentenced' to two years in the north of France, he discovers a funny way of life.	score 3+	moviereview rates films from 1 (unwatchable) to 5 (unmissable)
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Cast
Dany Boon, Karl Merad, Zoé Félix, Anne Marivin

Director
Dany Boon

Screenwriter
Dany Boon

Country
France (subtitles)

Rating / Running Time
M / 106 minutes

Australian Release
September 2008

Official Site

Dany Boon’s fish-out-of-water cultural-comedy smashed all-comers at the French box office. Quite why is another of those Gallic peculiarities, like Roquefort, or roundabouts. Although Welcome to the Sticks is great fun, it is far from being the best film the nation ever produced. I guess it hit a nerve. C’est la vie.

Boon works a familiar thread of yokels-hiding-a-good-secret that, in this case, is the northern region of Pas-de-Calais. Home to a unique dialect, ch’tis, it’s the French version of the Appalachian Mountains and is viewed as such by the rest of the country – a wet, alien world inhabited by unintelligible, unfathomable, culturally bereft hicks: like Queensland without the sun. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

Which is what a post office manager does when banished north for internal fraud (he posed as a paraplegic to get a job on the Côte d’Azur). Naturally he works through his initial horror to make friends of the likeable rustics and quickly finds life so good he conspires to keep his wife at home down south.

After an uncomfortable start where Boon narrowly avoids offending most viewers, Welcome to the Sticks drops into a hearty rhythm of feel-good farce led by the embraceable Kad Merad and Boon in a significant supporting role. He gets good mileage out of regional prejudice and the comedy key of an impenetrable northern dialect. English subtitles do a good job of bringing the linguistic gags across although French-speaking audiences will get better value. Then, having neatly ticked off all the requirements of a cheer-fest, he sends us home with the giddy fizz of a memorable, if not exactly vintage, sparkler.

// COLIN FRASER