Welcome To The Sticks (Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis) was released in France in February, and is the most successful French movie ever, with over 20 million admissions and a box-office take exceeding $US200 million in France alone.
A simple premise is weaved into a touching and hilarious journey into the profound beauty of simple unaffected lives. The plot is clichéd and banal, but the sincere humanity of the director, Dany Boon, who also co-wrote the script and has a starring role, and the sheer exuberance of the cast, transform a formula for bathos into paean to family, friendship, and simple fun.
A post-office functionary, Phillipe, played beautifully by a gangling Kad Merad, living with his depressive wife, Julie, and young son in a town in the south of France, is exiled to the cold forbidding north of the country after faking disability to wrangle a transfer to the Riviera. He leaves his Julie, who refuses to join him, and his son behind, and treks North to do battle in the sticks with the "country bumpkins" in a small village. When he gets there, after a series of misadventures and struggling with the absurd local argot and un-appetising provincial cuisine, he settles into a life of simple pleasures and bountiful friendship, while all the time concocting for his wife on his weekend visits home stories of terrible deprivation. When Julie can take the estrangement and the thought of his suffering alone no longer, she packs her bags and joins him, thus establishing the premise for the hilarious climax and dénouement.
Dany Boon, plays a simple post-man unmarried and in his mid-30s, who lives with his domineering mother, and pines for a vivacious postal clerk who also works at the local village post office, where the transferred functionary is the manager. It is the dynamic of the relationship between these two men that propels the story and is the catalyst for the life-changing inter-play for both men.
It is these two men's experience together one sunny day cycling through the village delivering the mail that forms the film's central tableau: a sequence so funny yet so moving, your laughter only just manages to contain heart-felt tears of joy.
Transported into a simpler world where friendship is real and work a truly communal extension of life, we confront what we have lost: the capacity of simply living in the moment. To fully live and realise our true being, we must jettison all pretension and embrace life stripped to its essentials.
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