Upon the U.S. opening of Intouchables, reportedly the second
most popular homegrown film in French history, I became curious about
this comedy, which is number one. It turns out to be a genial,
middlebrow comedy about a Post Office supervisor (Kad Merad) whose
scheme to get transferred to a nice seaside locale backfires. Instead,
his destination turns out to be a small town called Bergues in the most
northern part of France. The comedy largely rests upon the premise that
the French (or, at least, ones from more southerly parts) think of the
North as some awful backwater where the natives can barely speak and
where it’s so cold you need parkas in the summer. The supervisor’s wife,
with whom he’s been having marital issues, certainly thinks so, and
decides to stay behind in the South with their son.
And so, alone, the husband moves, finds the locals peculiar but
extremely friendly, the town charming, and so on, meanwhile telling his
wife it’s as awful as imagined. A quick Google search would, at the very
least, convinced her that the place at least had some visual charm, and
that the climate wasn’t awful, but never mind. A lot of the humor stems
from linguistic subtleties, including the unusual dialect
and occasionally incomprehensible pronunciations. The subtitles in the
version I watched did an excellent job of conveying the many such
misunderstandings, though it’s the kind of thing where it’s probably
funnier if you know the language. This might be one reason the film
wasn’t widely released theatrically outside of French-speaking places, despite
its success there. However, in its way it says as much about French
culture as its more highbrow kin, something like what an Adam Sandler
movie might say about a certain sort of American sensibility. (For one
thing, it says that the French will accept a bald guy in a leading
role.) By no means is this a great film—the hero’s turn from snobby jerk
to one of the fellas takes like five minutes—and the humor is mostly
middling, but it was fun to watch. The climactic scene in which the
wife inevitably arrives for a visit did make me laugh despite it being pretty
ridiculous. The director, incidentally, is Dany
Boon, who plays the genial, still-living-with-his-mom postman.
viewed 6/2/12 via streaming video and reviewed 6/3/12
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