The French have let me down, a little bit, forsaking their Jean-Luc Godard, high-art legacy by making writer-director Dany Boon’s Welcome to the Sticks (Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis) their highest-grossing movie ever. The film mostly recalls a lot of those average, American-made, slapsticky family-feel-goods and, of course, Will Smith is slated to produce a US version. Regional prejudice and tension, here the southern French view of the small-town north, are tapped for laughs. Sure enough, the north (Bergues, a town near the Belgian border) is where middle-class everyman Philippe Abrams (Kad Merad) is transferred by the post office, after his efforts to move his family to Provence by faking a handicap (wheelchair humour!) are thwarted.

What follows is a well-tuned tale of Philippe’s northern-French immersion, a little heavy on the language and accent jokes and mild homophobia, but sweet on the male bonding. Philippe emotes through his journey with a southern cop sympathetic to his move, an emotionally stunted underling and the various pastis-slinging northern-French men he encounters along the way.

Better though, and approached with subtleties usually unknown to comedy capers, is the heavy centre of Philippe’s adventures: the warm, happy trappings of stable employment and a good marriage. The tension between his home life and his new locale, quietly played out, restores some sense of French cinema’s reputation, buried underneath all the pratfalls.