The Sh'tis in Paris - A Family Gone Astray

Star architect Valentin D. (Dany Boon) has reached the pinnacle of his success. Together with his partner Constance Brandt (Laurence Arné), he is preparing a major retrospective at the Paris Museum of Modern Art. High-profile clients are lining up to see the couple, and the press is clamoring for interviews. It would be fatal if Valentin's big secret were to come to light. Because he is not, as he always pretends to be, an orphan, but actually a sh`ti from a simple background. Until now he has been able to hide this from the outside world. But then his mother (Line Renaud), brother (Guy Lecluyse) and his wife (Valérie Bonneton) show up in Paris for the opening of the exhibition of all things. Just when it seems like things can't get any worse, Valentin is involved in an accident that causes him to lose his memory - and suddenly he speaks only sh'ti .

Ten years have passed since Dany Boon directed one of France's most successful feature films, Welcome to the Sh'tis. Over 20 million French people and more than 2 million moviegoers in Germany laughed heartily at the Sch'tis and their strange dialect. Now Boon returns to that world. Die Sch'tis in Paris - Eine Familie auf Abwegen is, however, not a sequel to the cinema success, but a completely new story. And it's unfortunately not half as funny as the first lesson in sh`ti. The first film played a lot with clichés and prejudices and created a very charming and lovable oddball world, in which you just felt comfortable as a viewer. The sh`ti dialect was just one piece of a much larger, well designed puzzle there.

However, here the play with clichés becomes a cliché itself and the dialect only a means to an end. There is hardly anything left of the charm and endearment of the first film. Yes, there are still some very amusing scenes. But in the end the whole thing reminds us more of the chav family Flodder, which was so popular in the 80s, than of those sh`tis that Dany Boon introduced us to ten years ago. Even Pierre Richard, one of the greats of French comedy cinema, can only provide a tired smile here and hardly any real laughs.

The Sch'tis in Paris - A Family on the Wayside isn't really bad, but it's too weak to even come close to fulfilling the expectations placed on a new Sch'ti film. The attempt to turn the signs around and bring the Sch'tis from the province to the big city may have sounded funny on paper, but in the very chaotic realization it unfortunately only turned into a shallow calabash, which is quite funny now and then, but lacks the cryptic humor, the lovable characters and the charm of Welcome to the Sch'tis. And unfortunately, that only works to a very limited extent. Therefore, the bottom line is only one: Worth seeing with big deductions

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp