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...unapologetically feel-good movie is the work of stand-up comic and native Ch'ti Danny Boon, who plays the role of Bailleul. Boon has made no secret that his motive was to dismantle and mock French prejudices about the north and its inhabitants. As the box office figures show, French cinema lovers are lapping that effort up. But there's more at work than simple entertainment. "This movie is doing what [author Marcel] Pagnol did for the Provençals: showing that people broadly considered buffoonish and stupid are actually very interesting, alluring, and deeply human," says Patrice Languetif...
...Even if it doesn't go that far, the small budget ($16.5 million) les Ch'tis has already produced the mini-miracle of enticing French moviegoers into laugh away some of their own enduring regional prejudices. The movie tells the tale of Philippe Abrams, a manager in France's postal system whose efforts to finagle a transfer to the sunny Riviera go wildly wrong. His bosses punish him by sending him instead to the Nord Pas de Calais, warning him of its reputed cold, gloom, incessant rain, and expanses of flat, barren land pocked by slag heaps, abandoned mines...
When Americans want an iconic image of poverty, joblessness, alcoholism, and despair, they look to trailer parks. The rough French equivalent is the Nord Pas de Calais department, a swath of hardscrabble land that makes up about a third of France's northern border. While the neighboring Belgians remain the favorite butt of French jokes about simpletons, France has traditionally considered its indigenous northerners, known as Ch'ti, too miserable to even joke about. Instead, the Ch'ti were the folks filmmakers habitually went to for dismal, Zola-esque images of France's post-industrial decline and squalor. But that...
...Welcome to the Ch'tis) has sold more than 5 million tickets during its first week in the cinemas, shattering the previous roll-out box-office record of 3.9 million set in 2006 by Les Bronzés 3 - a comedy that similarly pokes fun at notorious French stereotypes. But whereas the Bronzés film was just the latest in a hugely popular series spanning back to the original 1978 film, Bienvenu chez les Ch'tis has been a bolt-from-the-blue phenomenon. Its simple, sex- and violence-free tale about normal, unappreciated people has many critics comparing...
...that increased friskiness doesn't necessarily mean the French are happier and better adjusted in the sack. Nearly 36% of French women say they've suffered "frequent or occasion" sexual dysfunction in the past year of their lives, while just over 21% of French men declared the same. That may explain why an estimated 500,000 patients in France visit sex counselors. But the study shows that some enduring French sexual myths are in fact without foundation, particularly the traditional contention of French men that their naturally larger sexual appetites give them grounds to fool around more. French women...