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Film: Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis
Release date: 4th April 2008
Certificate: 12A
Running time: 102 mins
Director: Dany Boon
Starring: Kad Merad, Dany Boon, Zoé Félix, Lorenzo Ausilia-Foret, Anne Marivin
Genre: Comedy
Studio: Pathe!
Format: DVD
Country: France
Breaking box office records in France upon its release, this comedy by actor-director Dany Boon has been such a hit with the public and critics alike that a Hollywood remake starring Will Smith is underway.
Welcome to the Sticks, as Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis translates, is the story of Philippe Abrams (Kad Merad), a post-office worker from Provence in Southern France.
In order to please his depressed wife, Julie (Zoé Félix), Philippe comes up with a scam to try and get relocated to the sunny Riviera. However, he is rumbled by his superiors, who immediately exile him to the small, dead-end town of Bergues, in the Nord-Pas de Calais region of Northern France, where the strange, half-savage inhabitants greet him in unintelligible patois – the Ch’ti dialect of this region.
Though his fellow co-workers at first only reinforce Philippe’s stereotypical views of this region, he slowly begins to get to know them - and discovers that his misconceptions were completely wrong. He becomes friends with his co-workers Antoine (Dany Boon) and Annabelle (Anna Marivin), and is soon immersed in the daily life of the friendly town. His problems are not over, however.
His wife refuses to believe that he is having a good time, and thinks he is just putting on a brave face. He gives up trying to convince her otherwise, and things seem to be going well until she decides to come and visit him. More deceptions ensue, and Philippe tests his new-found friendships to the limit, with hilarious results...
The plot is not the most innovative in the world; sophisticated southerner moves to the grim north against his will and finds that it’s not as grim as he imagined. However, in this film, it doesn’t feel like a cliché; the comic script is brilliant, with an emphasis on clever wordplay. Despite the film’s huge success in France, and other francophone countries, it is little-known in the UK. It is perhaps hard to imagine how French wordplay can work in English subtitles, but it does. It works very well in fact - the subtitles are almost an art form of their own with their wry substitutions for the French misunderstandings.
Furthermore, the inhabitants of Bergues are not just the naively endearing characters one might expect from this type of film - that would have left it floundering within the realms of cliché. In contrast, they are fully-formed individuals, and the women, in particular – Annabelle and Antoine’s mother – are intelligent and formidable.
Kad Merad and Dany Boon shine in this film as the two unlikely friends. They have worked together before, and it shows - they make the perfect double-act, and the comedy zings between them as they struggle to understand each other. Anna Marivin also stands out as the no-nonsense Annabelle - the interpretation of this character could have become very two-dimensional, but Marivin has made her a rounded, complete character. The comic interactions between the characters and the skill with which the actors pull it off, making it seem effortless, really lifts this film.
Boon is an astute director, who deliberately overplays the stereotypes before completely overturning them so that it is very tongue-in-cheek. This is illustrated best with Philippe’s journey to Bergues: he is first cautioned by the police for driving too slowly, so reluctant is he to get there, and the moment he passes the sign, announcing he is now in the Nord-Pas de Calais, it immediately tips it down with rain. This film does not take itself too seriously, which would have otherwise undermined the comedy. It does, however, demonstrate a sincere, genuine affection for the Ch’ti region and its people, and this shines through.
This is the success of this film, apart from the obvious comedy. It is a film with a heart. Dany Boon is himself a Ch’ti and, since this film, the region’s champion and hero. Never before has the area been portrayed in such a prolific and positive way. Audiences have fallen in love with this film, and tourism to the Nord-Pas de Calais has increased tenfold. This is in no small part due to the creation and development of the characters. They at first seem like caricatures, but develop into real people, with the kinds of feelings, behaviours and idiosyncrasies that the audience can relate to. Antoine’s words to Philippe, “A visitor to the north cries twice: once when he arrives and once when he leaves,” resonate - Philippe despairs when he arrives in the town and we see it through his eyes; a dismal, desolate place in the cold, grey north, but we, like Philippe, connect and empathise with these people. Although the title Welcome to the Sticks has a certain irony to start with, at the end, there is a real sadness when it comes to saying goodbye to the Ch’tis.
One of the most original comedies to come out of France in recent years, this is an intelligent and riotous take on French stereotypes – don’t miss it! KS
Film: 22 Bullets
Release date: 31st January 2011
Certificate: 18
Running time: 115 mins
Director: Richard Berry
Starring: Jean Reno, Kad Merad, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Marina Fois, Gabriella Wright
Genre: Action/Crime/Thriller
Studio: Anchor Bay
Format: DVD & Blu-ray
Country: France
Jean Reno returns to the kind of sensitive tough guy role which gained him worldwide fame in Leon in the early-90s. Franz-Olivier Giesbert’s novel based on real life crime in the Marseille underworld, L’Immortel, inspired the character of Charly Matteï - a one-time gangster who reforms for the sake of a quiet life with his wife and family.
Three years into his retirement from crime, and seemingly safely cocooned in the peace of family life, Charly Matteï is ambushed and gunned down in an underground car park in Marseille’s old port by masked gunmen, his body ravaged by the 22 bullets of the title. Remarkably, he survives to take revenge upon his would-be killers.
The briefly explicated back-story reveals that Charly Matteï had fallen in love with someone equally entangled in the Marseille underworld, a woman under the control of both a violent pimp and her own drug addiction. Extricating her from both, he turned his back on crime’s empty rewards of power and money in order to create a safe and peaceful way of life for his new family. But retirement from the fragile hierarchy, and secret loyalties of the city’s criminal society was clearly never to be as simple as he had hoped.
Charly’s resolution to remove himself and his family from the perils of the underworld inevitably gives way to his instinct to take revenge upon those who have betrayed him, his blood drenched vendetta destined to stain the sun bleached streets of Marseille…
The character of Charly Matteï was apparently inspired by a real life Marseille crime lord Jacques Imbert, who suffered a similarly vicious attack yet lived to tell the tale, earning himself the nickname of The Immortal. The film’s writer and director used this incident and other material from Franz-Olivier Giesbert’s novel as his initial inspiration, augmenting this with his own research carried out in the Marseille underworld. It is a pity, then, that so little of anything distinctive or remarkable survives in either the script or the plot. The film is full of generic and predictable motifs from the mafia film genre – from a lame interrogation scene culminating in the victim’s body falling to the floor in slow motion, to the uneasy bonhomie of a birthday celebration for one of the gangsters - the excess of drugs and drink finding its inevitable ending in a bloodbath.
The actors deserve better than this script. Reno’s irrefutable charisma is given few chances to shine, but takes flight in a handful of scenes where his understated menace puts the thrill into the thriller. A rare humorous scene, Matteï in monologue with a cat, allows Reno to show the character’s humane side in a more original context than the rather schmaltzy scenes of family togetherness.
Marina Foïs provides the other standout performance as the police investigator attempting to break the code of silence surrounding the criminal fraternity, and facing apathetic and political opposition from her own police chief. Her finely understated and, in the main, unsentimental performance is undermined by the banality of the script. When Matteï proposes that she let him walk in order to set a trap for his would-be killer, she counters with the lame line: “I have a tough job to do” – as an exposition of the shadowy moral complexities faced by an investigator implicated by her association with a known criminal, it’s hardly thought provoking.
There are other potentially strong performances that are undermined by the blandness of the script and the predictability of the plot. Kad Merad as the current Mafia boss, a close ally of Mattei since childhood; or Jean-Pierre Darroussin, playing the inevitably morally compromised role of lawyer to organised crime lords. As for Matteï’s current wife, and indeed his first wife who also makes a number of very brief appearances, these are cardboard cut-out parts. Considering that Matteï is supposed to have turned his back on the brotherly bonds of his crime family in order to be with his wife, her part is horribly underwritten.
The other great omission of the film is the underuse of Marseille as a distinctive location. There is the odd shot which gives a sense of the place – the bare bones bleached-ness of a hillside graveyard, the exotically striped facade of the cathedral reflected in the windows of a passing car, or the medieval squalor of rubbish bags piled up in a market place. These intermittently appealing scenes only emphasise the film’s general lack of visual impact. A director of such a film might argue that pretty-pretty aesthetics are not appropriate to the subject – but higher quality cinematography could legitimately be used here to heighten dramatic effect. One scene takes as its setting the industrial backdrop of an oil refinery; the sense of horror of the torture and murder that take place here could have been heightened by better use of the starkly lit alienation of the refinery’s towers lit up against the night sky, but poor cinematography reduces the impact of the scene.
The underwhelming sense of menace is in part due to the cartoonish characterisation of the evil henchmen – again, an inevitable result of predictable plotting and woefully underwritten dialogue. As the villains drive past Matteï following a further failed attempt on his life, there is the merest suggestion of a phantom fist shaking and the words, “I’ll get you, Penelope Pitstop”. Considering how certain actions in the film are – the peppering of Matteï’s body with bullets, boiling water being poured over his face, someone’s head being repeatedly slammed with a car door – the violence appears curiously bloodless and insipid, reflecting the blinkered morality of the reformed Matteï. The hypocrisy of his personal ethics is challenged towards the end of the film, but the challenge lacks the subtlety that could have made this a disturbing and thought provoking examination of a troubled conscience.
22 Bullets has a fine premise – the moral consequences inherent in a reformed criminal trying to turn his back upon the violence and degradation of his former life, and whether such a way of life can be consigned to the past. The calibre of the acting talent is underused by the script and plot, while the setting of Marseille could have been used to much stronger effect to reflect the harshness and beauty of the film’s feudal moral code. Given the promise of its concept and cast, the film disappoints. KR
22 Bullets, starring Jean Reno (Leon) and directed by Richard Berry (The Black Box), is a thriller inspired by the real-life events in the world of the Marseille Mafia. Sharing writing duties with Berry is Irène writer Eric Assous.
Charly Matteï has turned his back on his life as an outlaw. For the last three years, he's led a peaceful life devoting himself to his wife and two children. Then, one winter morning, he's left for dead in the parking garage in Marseille's Old Port, with 22 bullets in his body.
Against all the odds, he doesn't die...
Film: 22 Bullets
Release date: 31st January 2011
Certificate: 18
Running time: 113 mins
Director: Richard Berry
Starring: Jean Reno, Kad Merad, Marina Pois, Jean-Pierre Darroussin
Genre: Action/Crime/Thriller
Studio: Anchor Bay
Format: DVD & Blu-ray
Country: France
Special Features:
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Interviews
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22 Bullets in Marseille
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Making of
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Original French trailer
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Theatrical trailer
