原文: Not so grim up north

Northern France

Not so grim up north

Mar 6th 2008 PARIS
From The Economist print edition

The French discover the charms of rain, chips and beer

THE north of France is the bit you pass through in order to get somewhere else. At least, that is the way that many French people (and foreigners) have looked at this mining, steel and textile region: a cross between America's rustbelt and the British Midlands. Yet the French are now in the grip of northern fever, thanks to a comedy, “Bienvenue Chez les Ch'tis”, that is breaking French box-office records.

Jean-Claude LotherEmbracing les Ch'tis

It tells the story of a post-office manager who tries to scheme his way into a job on the Med but is instead dispatched to the dreaded, rain-soaked, chip-eating, beer-drinking north. Despite his prejudices about les Ch'tis, as the locals call themselves, he ends up charmed—and with him, it seems, is the rest of France. In its first five days, the low-budget film sold more tickets in Paris than the previous record-holder, “Star Wars III”.

Dany Boon, the movie's writer-director and comic star, himself a Ch'ti, has become a national celebrity.“In French cinema,” he says, “all the nice comedies are shot in the south, and all the grim dramas in the north.”

In the popular imagination, the north is captured by Émile Zola's novel, “Germinal”, set in the dismal coal mines around Valenciennes, or such contemporary films as Bertrand Tavernier's “Ça Commence Aujourd'hui”, shot in a bleak, red-brick town also near Valenciennes. Miserabilisme and the north, it seems, go hand in hand.

This image is partly rooted in fact. Industrial decline has knocked the north hard. Joblessness there runs at 11.5%, compared with 8% countrywide. Average GDP per head is half that in Paris, and four-fifths the national average.

Yet, despite such troubles, the north has reinvented itself. Ever since the Eurostar linked Lille by high-speed rail to London and Brussels in 1994, services, and tourism in particular, have boomed. The Flemish centre of old Lille, with its cobbled streets and gilt-edged stonework, has been scrubbed up; new cafés and boutiques flourish.

In 2006 some 1.1m foreigners visited the north, more than three times as many as went to the Loire valley. For the French, it seems to have taken a movie to divert their sun-oriented gaze.

译文: 北方并非如此糟糕