French Comedy

Directed by Dany Boon, 2008, 106 min. 

A man from the beautiful South of France has to move to the far North. He expects to find a dreadful cold place full of strange rednecks speaking an incomprehensible dialect. But the reality turns out to be different than the prejudice.

A man from the beautiful South of France has to move to the far North. He expects to find a dreadful cold place full of strange rednecks speaking an incomprehensible dialect. But the reality turns out to be different than the prejudice.Although living a comfortable life in Salon-de-Provence, a charming town in the South of France, Julie has been feeling depressed for a while. To please her husband, a post office administrator, tries to obtain a transfer to a seaside town on the French Riviera. The trouble is that he is caught red-handed while trying to scam an inspector. Philippe is immediately banished to the distant unheard of town of Bergues, in the Far North of France. In this area, the indigenes speak a language known as Picard - an amalgam of French, Flemish and Latin - and Philippe essentially perceives the region as the "Siberia of France." Leaving his child and wife behind, the crucified man leaves for his frightening destination, a dreadfully cold place inhabited by hard-drinking, unemployed rednecks, speaking an incomprehensible dialect called Ch'ti. Philippe soon realizes that all these ideas were nothing but prejudices and that Bergues is not synonymous with hell...

Jeanette den Toonder is associate professor of contemporary French and Francophone literature and culture at the department of European Languages and Cultures. She is also the director of the Centre for Canadian Studies at this university. She has published widely on francophone immigrant writing, focusing on questions of travel, identity and space.

Links:
YouTube: Trailer Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis
IMDb: Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis