Family Is Family

Family Is Family (La Ch'tite Famille, 2018) is a French comedy you can watch online on iFILM. Dany Boon directs and stars, the same filmmaker behind Welcome to the Sticks, once again mining the gap between polished Paris and the plainspoken north of France.

Valentin is a successful furniture designer who keeps quiet about where he came from. He even claims to be an orphan, anything to hide that his family runs a scrap-metal shop up north. Then, on the eve of a major exhibition, a car knocks him down. He wakes up acting like the twenty-year-old provincial he used to be before he left for the capital, thick regional accent and all. His fiancée is appalled, his relatives are delighted, and Valentin is stuck between two versions of himself. Line Renaud and Pierre Richard round out the cast.

The humor runs on accent, class friction and a gentle jab at snobbery. Boon never begs for sympathy or flattens his characters into cartoons; under the gags sits a warm idea about roots and the people we are wrong to be ashamed of. Easy French fare for an unhurried evening. Stream Family Is Family (2018) online on iFILM.