European Films

French southerner Philippe Abrams (Kad Merad, Je vais bien ne t'en fais pas / Don't Worry, I'm Fine) is a low-level manager with the French postal services who wants to get higher up and move further south, preferably to the Côte d'Azur. Torn between the lay-down-low advice of his manager colleague Jean (Stéphane Freiss, Ozon’s 5x2) and his own instincts that tell him otherwise, he makes such a mess of his promotion interview that he is downgraded to the position of director of a small-town post office in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region (which is "even further north than Paris!" as one of the characters exclaims, clearly aghast).

Leaving behind his depressed wife Julie (Zoé Félix) and their young son Raphaël (Lorenzo Ausilia-Foret) to make the grand trek to the north by himself, Abrams encounters both the police and some terrible weather while still en route, allowing writer-director Boon and co-screenwriters Alexandre Charlot and Franck Magnier the chance to milk the southerner’s fear of the north for all it is worth before turning the tables on both Abrams and the audience. Not even one day after his arrival, the sun is out and his colleagues at the post office -- the genial if lovesick Antoine (Boon), Antoine’s not-so-secret crush Annabelle (Anne Marivin) and the duo Yann and Fabrice (Guy Lecluse and Philippe Duquesne) -- are readying a warm welcome for Philippe, who becomes increasingly worried about how he should tell his wife and kid back home that he is actually enjoying himself.

Boon clearly loves his own region and has found the right format for his love letter to the North by using inversion tactics not unlike those used by Oscar Wilde in his fairy tales. Rather than simply waxing lyrical about how great it is up north, he uses a protagonist who fears the worst, which makes his beloved North look even sunnier when everything turns out to be just fine. It also allows the filmmaker to poke fun at prejudices on both sides, and while many are of course exaggerated for humorous effect, the film as a whole feels surprisingly coherent and real because the characters retain some human dignity amidst all the mayhem (not in small part because Merad's everyman qualities are fully exploited by Boon).

Though the English title has now been changed to Welcome to the Sticks, the awkward original translation of the title, Welcome to the Land of Ch’tis, still merits an explanation. Ch’ti is not only the name of a famous beer from the French north (amply featured in the film its characteristic yellow cans) but also of the people living in the south of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region. The word Ch’ti in fact captures two important features of the Picarde dialect: French "s" sounds become "ch", and French personal pronouns such as "toi" and "moi" (you and me) become "ti" and "mi". The dialect itself is often referred to as Ch’timi.

Boon uses the "s"/"ch" difference for one of the most surreal conversations in recent French cinema, when a cat (pronounced "cha" in French) is confused with Ch’timi for "that" (pronounced "cha" in Ch’timi) and a dog ("chien" in French) becomes the equivalent of "his" or "sien" ("chien" in the Picarde dialect). In one scene, an entire conversation between Merad and Boon is highjacked by what is essentially one joke, but because of an intelligent script and the actors’ flawless comic timing the same joke is expertly milked many times. Translations for foreign audiences will be extremely hard for scenes like this, though there are still more than enough other types of humour to keep foreign viewers entertained, most notably an extended sequence in an old mining village that comes as no surprise but is nevertheless expertly executed.

For the record: the main action is set in the picturesque town of Buerges, which is actually anachronistic, since the dialect of that town is historically a Flemish and not a Picarde dialect such as Ch’timi. In what can be described as yet another ironic twist, Buerges is actually too far north to be in the land of Ch’tis.

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