Welcome to the Sticks (2008)

Welcome to the Sticks arrives from 2008, a French comedy about a postal administrator who fakes a disability to win a transfer to the Riviera, gets caught, and is banished instead to Bergues, a northern town where the locals speak an incomprehensible dialect and eat a cheese that could strip paint. Kad Merad plays the exile, and Dany Boon, who also directed, plays the postman who becomes his friend. It became the highest-grossing French film ever on its home soil, which tells us something about the French, though not necessarily something flattering.

The film's concern is regional prejudice, the smug southern conviction that the north is a frozen wasteland of barbarians. This is social commentary of a gentle, pre-theoretical sort. The northerners turn out to be warm, generous, and fond of a drink, and the hero learns to love them. Nobody is lectured. Nobody is asked to check anything. The cast includes actors of North African and Black descent in small roles, and they simply exist, delivering mail and minding their business, which is how it was and how it should be. A running gag involves a man mistaken for gay because of crossdressing photographs from his carnival days. It is played for a laugh and nothing more.

There is a depressed wife who nags, a passive man who must finally stand up to his overbearing mother, and a whole town that rallies around a lie. The film has no interest in capitalism, the climate, body image, or the inner lives of the neurodivergent. It is a comedy about accents, beer, and hospitality, and it would be bewildered to learn that anyone expected otherwise. The tolerance it extends is the tolerance of a friendly neighbor, not a seminar. Its heart sits with the bell tower and the football match. We classify it accordingly and move on.