Too Ch'ti for Me

Dany Boon’s celebrated directorial début is a comedy about a hopeless civil servant (played by Kad Merad) forced to exile himself to a notoriously backward part of France in order to keep his job.

The gags are generally self-deprecating—revolving around prejudicial stereotypes associated with Boon’s home region (Nord-Pas-de-Calais) and the people (the Ch’tis) who live there. Gradually, the slapstick gives way to a sympathetic portrait that is clearly designed to rehabilitate this backwater in the French national psyche.

Given the film’s success (the highest grossing ever in France until The Intouchables), I’d say it struck a chord, but the Ch’ti lingo was so problematic for this non-native French speaker that I can’t really give a fair opinion.

Much of the regional dialect is incomprehensible to me and enabling the English subtitles doesn’t help. Many scenes simply cannot be translated literally and some are so far removed from the original French that it’s like watching two different films.

Maybe I’ll rewatch and re-rate if I can improve my Ch’ti comprehension. 🤪