WELCOME TO THE STICKS (2008) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Dany Boon
Kat Merad, Dany Boon, Zoé Felix, Anne Marivin,
Lorenzo Ausilia-Foret, Philippe Duquesne, Guy Lecluyse,
Line Renaud, Stéphane Freiss, Michel Galabru
A fish-out-of-water comedy that set box-office records in France, about a post-office supervisor who's passed over for a post on the Riviera and assigned to an outpost in the North, where it's believed the days are short and bleak, the nights are cold and depressing, living conditions are primitive, and the inhabitants are drunken louts who barely speak French. That last part, about the language, turns out to be true. The dialect is all but indecipherable, and knowing French won't necessarily help, so keep an eye on the subtitles. (The subtitles won't help much, either, but they're funny.) The best stuff comes when the postmaster's wife turns up, and the locals go out of their way to act even more uncouth than she thinks they are. It's not hard to imagine an American version of this being set in Northern Wisconsin.
