What are Ch'tis? This has to be explained at the outset, even for the French audience, in the second most watched film of all time in France. Put simply, they're the people of the countryside in the very north of the country, with a dialect which is seen as bizarre and makes up the bulk of the humour in this low-brow but amiable comedy, as a post office manager from the sunny south is seconded to a small town in Ch'ti country as punishment for his misdeeds. Naturally, despite his misgivings about his exile to the virtual Arctic, he soon warms to the locals and then has to keep lying to his wife, still in the Provence, about the horrors he faces daily to affirm her prejudices and dissuade her from coming up to see for herself.
Since the humour is so heavily dependent on the language barrier, as a foreigner one has to rely on a competent translation to convey the gist and the subtitler makes a game attempt here, even if that means that trying to decipher the garbled English produced as a result is somewhat of a distraction from the French source. In any case, the jollity generally makes it through intact, and while it should hardly win any awards for sublety or ingenuity,
Welcome to the Sticks is a pleasant enough ride.
6/10
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