WELCOME TO THE STICKS
Welcome to the Sticks (Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis) is a French comedy about a Post Office manager forced to transfer to the North of France. Fearing the worst, and the cold, he falls in love with the locals and with life there, but chooses to hide this from his wife back in the south. It’s very charming, cute, funny, and has one of the best drunken sequences I’ve ever seen, but perhaps may suffer outside of France due to its particular focus on French cultural prejudices, and reliance on the nuanced turns of language between regions. The subtitlers have made an absolutely heroic effort to make this film accessible to us, and have largely succeeded ‘ the different ‘dialect’ of the Northerners, subtitled, is jarring only for a few scenes beyond its first encounter. The Seachange and culture-shock themes, however, are universal, and this film carries them off delightfully, with many satisfying comic turns along the way. (Michael Farrell).
