Our guest blogger R.Kent at 'The Nervous Breakdown' has travelled the length and breadth of the country and believes that France is a place whose parts are as great as its sum.

Go to any movie theater in France right now, and the longest line will be for a fish-out-of-water comedy called Bienvenue Chez les Ch’tis (Welcome to the Land of the Ch’tis).

The movie tells the story of Philippe, a post office manager who gets reassigned from a sunny town in Provence to cold Bergues, a small village in Nord Pas-de-Calais, in the extreme north of France, home to a weird people who call themselves Ch’tis.

Philippe’s new friend Antoine, along with a cast of wacky locals, welcome the newbie, teaching him how to speak Ch’ti (which to my American ears sounds like drunk French, the ‘s’ sound becoming ‘sh’, the end of each sentence punctuated with a sound somewhat like an angry duck’s quack).

Philippe, at first utterly aghast at the prospect of having to spend two years in this strange land where torrential rains start at the border and the residents breakfast on bread first slathered in pungent cheese, then dipped in chicory-flavored coffee, eventually learns to speak Ch’ti like a local and ends up loving the place.

When it’s time for Philippe to return home to the south of France, he is predictably sad to go.

Antoine explains to him the local adage that “People only cry twice in Nord Pas-de-Calais. When they arrive, and when they leave.”

(Of course, with his Ch’ti accent, he is nearly incomprehensible, but I believe that is what he said.)

The movie is pretty funny, but on the surface nothing special.

After three weeks in the theaters, though, over 12.5 million people have passed through the turnstiles of this country of 60 million, and the film is on pace to beat the box-office record for a French film, of 17 million, set in 1967 (French population: 51 million) by the World War II comedy, La Grande Vadrouille. (And it's well on its way to overtaking Titanic at 20.7 million spectators as the most viewed film ever on French soil.)

What is it about this movie that has all the French so excited?

I think the reason is that just as Vadrouille was a funny comedy that touched on the French people’s common experience of the war, Bienvenue... brings to light something else common to the French: regional pride.

(Regional pride is not unique to the French, of course. Any Green Bay Packers or Philadelphia Phillies fan can tell you that.)

But Bienvenue...does three things well.

1. It takes a region of France that people not from that area maybe don’t know too well.

2. It exposes the French people’s limited, stereotypical view of that region.

3. And it embraces the regional differences that make (in this case) Nord Pas-de-Calais so unique and loved by its inhabitants, inviting all of France to visit the land of the Ch’tis, to discover the good, the bad, and the bizarre for themselves.

I have lived in Paris – off and on – for over two years now, and in that time, the lovely Isabelle and I have tried to visit as much of the rest of her country as time and money will allow.

We’ve been to Belle Ile en Mer, off the coast of Bretagne, and we’ve gotten lost in the picturesque villages of Bourgogne.

Isabelle and I have seen the beaches of Normandy, and we have stood atop the fortress at La Rochelle, in the Poitou Charentes region.

For Easter, we took the TGV eastward to Strasbourg, in Alsace, where we had the opportunity to discover another unique region of France.

Alsace abuts the German border to the east, and German influence is immediately obvious.

Most towns along Alsace’s Vineyard Route, which wends south through Alsace, between the Vosges Mountains to the west and the Rhine plain to the east, have severe-sounding German names.

In Strasbourg, we ate traditional Alsatian dishes, such as flammekueche (or tarte flambeé in French), a type of cracker-thin pizza served with crème fraiche instead of tomato sauce.

In the quaint town center of Strasbourg, we walked through snow falling on cobblestones, shooting photos of the colorful wood-framed houses.

Isabelle mentioned that if I thought Alsace looked like a land from a Disney fairytale, I wouldn’t be far off, as it was towns and villages on Germany’s side of the Rhine River where a lot of those images come from.

She was right, in that Alsace often did seem like something out of a fairytale, from Rosheim’s oldest boulangerie in France, to Strasbourg’s sharp cathedral, rising heavenward, to men walking pet pigs, to some of the jolliest waiters and waitresses I’ve ever seen in France.

And though Alsace cannot help but exhibit strong German characteristics, it is a part of France.

This region that has been passed back and forth from French to German control over the centuries has carved out an identity all its own.

Not quite German, not all French, Alsace embraces its mottled history, and its visitors are rewarded for it.

While we walked all over Strasbourg, munching on soft pretzels and ducking into cafés for hot chocolates when we couldn’t take the cold any longer, I thought about Bienvenue Chez les Ch’tis, and how the Alsatian people probably feel just as proud of their pays as their countrymen the Ch’tis to the northwest; the Bourgignons to the west; or the Provençals far to the south.

No wonder the movie is so successful.

R.Kent

April 2008

The Nervous Breakdown