WELCOME TO THE STICKS/ BIENVENUE CHEZ LES CH'TIS

APPARENTLY 18 million people have seen this broad French comedy on release in its home territories. To say that this news fills the reviewer with a degree of trepidation is not to direct any particular opprobrium towards the French public. Still, unhappy hours spent in front of Les Visiteursand Asterix and Obelix vs Caesarhave confirmed that mainstream Gallic comedies can be every bit as bad as their American counterparts.

Well, Welcome to the Stickshas its charms, but for all the sense it will makes to the average Irish person, it may as well have been subtitled in Sanskrit. The picture concerns a postal worker (Kad Merad) who undergoes various traumas when transferred from the south to the north of France. If the script is to be believed, citizens from the country's sunnier locales view the area near Calais as an icy wasteland populated by unwashed trolls with an inexhaustible capacity for alcohol.

This being a decent film made by decent folk, the hero, of course, soon learns that, despite their apparent barbarities, the citizens of the north are every bit as human as their more bronzed compatriots.

The subtitles fail to convey the idiomatic nuances of the locale, but whoever worked so hard at finding English equivalents for Pas-de- Calais's phonetic eccentricities does deserve a special Oscar. The jokes concerning the smelliness of the local cheese and the oddness of the area's sausages make even less sense on this side of the Channel.

And yet. This indisputably warm- hearted enterprise - which is more to do with undermining misguided perceptions of less glamorous locales than with ridiculing the supposed yokels - does speak to a universal concern. One can imagine a similar comedy involving a move from Donnybrook to Dundalk, or from Notting Hill to Nottingham.

Indeed, Will Smith has recently embarked on an American remake of Welcome to the Sticks. Expect the compass points to be reversed and the whiffy cheese gags to be replaced by cracks about hogs' innards.