A film about a man who learns to love his rural town has France debating urban snobbery.

By ELISABETH VINCENTELLI

The sudden success of a small, character-driven film about life in rural France has touched a nerve and sparked a collective bout of Gaullic soulsearching.
Since its release on February 20, an unassuming low-budget comedy about a man from the city moving to the country, “Bienvenue Chez les Ch’tis (“Welcome to the Sticks) has been attracting filmgoers in astounding numbers.
While the film combines two familiar narratives - someone in an unfamiliar situation and “yuppie learns from simple folks- the bigger-picture interpretation reaches beyond the plot.
For Stephane Fouks, president of the advertising agency Euro-RSCG Worldwide, “Bienvenue is so popular because the French are “fed up with being fed up. Fed up with being world champions in bad news and psychotropic drugs. We want to believe. Not to be the best and win market shares in a globalized world, but just to build our happiness.
The movie has sold close to 19 million tickets in a country of 65 million people, and is set to overtake the all-time domestic record of 20.7 million set by “Titanic. Made for $17 million,“Bienvenue has had sales of about $185 million so far. Directed by the comedian Dany Boon, who is also a co-star, “Bienvenue tells the story of a post office manager from Salon-de-Provence, Philippe Abrams (Kad Merad), who’s sent off to a small northern town as a disciplinary measure. Like most Frenchmen, who imagine the Nord-Pas de Calais region as cold, rainy and packed with alcoholic hicks (the Ch’tis of the title), Philippe expects hell. But he is quickly won over by the welcoming kindness of his new employees and neighbors - even if he can barely understand their thick patois. Soon, he’s eating stinky Maroilles cheese and downing powerful local spirits like the best of them.
Within a few weeks, “Bienvenue had turned into a bona fide grass-roots phenomenon: Sales of Maroilles and the local Ch’ti beer have skyrocketed; busloads of tourists swarm Bergues, the town where the action takes place. Suddenly, every French person felt a Ch’ti connection.
When the film critics on a popular public radio round table mildly expressed reservations, the show got flooded with irate letters attacking “Parisian ethnocentrism. After supporters of the Paris Saint-Germain soccer team unfurled a 40-meterlong banner at a game against the northern city of Lens saying “Pedophiles, unemployed, inbred: Welcome to the Ch’tis, the entire nation rose to the defense of the beleaguered Ch’tis.
“Who would have bet that a regionalist story in the land of Maroilles and fast-food shacks would receive an embrace transcending social classes and generations? Le Parisien, the newspaper, marveled.
Still, the North isn’t likely to replace Provence or Paris as the international image of France any time soon, and so far there doesn’t seem to be a rush of people actually moving there.
Not coincidentally perhaps, the rise of the Ch’tis has been matched by the fall of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s popularity. Many pundits have interpreted the praise of small-town living in an unglamorous, untrendy region as a rebuke to Mr. Sarkozy’s pro-capitalist politics and his flashy lifestyle. Indeed, the movie is laying bare fault lines running through a France anxious at the prospect of losing its identity and cultural roots to a dehumanizing globalization closely linked to America.
“It’s a movie without special effects or a humongous budget, Mr. Boon said. “No big cars; nothing ‘in your face.’ The opposite of big American movies.
Curiously, the few expressions of dissent have come from the intellectual left, which usually has no problem railing against big money and Hollywood.
In Le Monde, Philippe Marliere wrote, “Not only do the lead characters speak an incomprehensible patois, but they’re also ugly and obese, inactive or lazy, and they show, of course, a taste for the bottle.
Jack Lang, a former minister of culture and now representing the Pas de Calais in the Chamber of Deputies, rallied on behalf of the North: “People up there really are generous, kind. That’s authentic! What the movie is against is cliches.