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Plot Summary
Philippe Abrams is the director of the Salon-de-Provence post office. He's married to Julie, whose depressed state makes life impossible. To make her happy, Philippe plots to get transferred to the Côte d’Azur. But it backfires, and he is transferred to Bergues, a small town in northern France, instead.
Customer Reviews
Biggest French movie of ALL TIME...
...and I can see why. Kad Merad and Dany boon has to be one of the greatest comedic pair in years! A must see for fans of classic comedies.
Wow
I wasn't expecting this. It was very good. If you speak french it's a hoot, but my wife who is learning thought it was super. You can imagine the hard work that went into this, all of it is great. If you double it up with Nothing to declare there isn't anything in the US that is this cute. We watched it twice in a row as I had so much fun laughing. However, there is some truth to this movie, many friends have warned me about northern France. The reactions that the actors have are priceless. A great flick for a rainy night, or whenever. Pas Mal!
Not great, but fun to watch.
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 released theatrically outside of French-speaking Europe (and the Netherlands), 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 white 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.
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- $12.99
- Genre: Comedy
- Released: 2008
- © Hirsch PATHE - TF1 FILMS PRODUCTION - LES PRODUCTIONS DU CH'TIMI -CRRAV 2008