Welcome to the Sticks

Welcome to the Sticks (2008) starts with a post office manager in the south of France. Trying to engineer a transfer to the Mediterranean coast to please his wife, Philippe is caught and posted north to Bergues as a punishment. Everything he knows about the north is dreadful: cold, drink, an incomprehensible language. When he gets there, none of it turns out to be true. All the comedy comes from language. Ch'ti, spoken in the region, comes from the Picard family; sounds shift and Philippe understands nothing first time. It is also what the film loses most in subtitles. Dany Boon directed, wrote it with Alexandre Charlot and Franck Magnier, and plays one of the leads opposite Kad Merad. Boon is from the north himself. The commercial result was historic in France: it is the highest grossing French film ever at the French box office. It took 192.9 million dollars domestically and 245.1 million worldwide against a 14.4 million budget. Remakes followed. An Italian version, Benvenuti al Sud, was made in 2010, succeeded and produced a sequel; a Dutch remake came in 2017. Negotiations for an English language version with Will Smith were officially abandoned in 2015, and that version would have replaced the postal service with a multinational company. It runs 106 minutes. Good for: comedy about regional prejudice, French popular cinema, and jokes about language. Less good for: most of the humour is lost in translation. The plot is simple and predictable, and the subplot built on a lie runs long. The problems of the north are romanticised.