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Going by the numbers, one out of every four French men, women and children has now seen the film Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis. Sometimes it seems that just as many have pontificated on the reasons why it is a hit.

In just a few weeks, the unassuming little comedy has broken box-office records and been labelled "the national anti-depressant" by state television.

This weekend, it became the country's most popular French film of all time, seen in movie theatres by more than 17 million people and spawning an almost daily barrage of sociological analysis.

The starting point of the movie is the linguistic and gastronomic peculiarity of the northernmost tip of France, where the locals speak a patois known as Ch'ti, (pronounced shtee) and breakfast on an odorous local cheese dipped in their morning coffee.

A henpecked postal worker from the sunny Côte d'Azur is sent there as a punishment. At first he finds it the stereotypical rainy boondocks that he expected. ("Is there something wrong with your jaw?" he asks the first Ch'ti speaker he meets). But France is France, north or south, and soon the exiled sophisticate learns to love the authenticity and warmth of the place.

Like any feel-good movie, this one shows friendship triumphing over prejudice. Its appeal is also nostalgic for the charm of distinct regional identities, the easy life of a government job, the virtues of male bonding and the healing properties of a shared beer.

But success has come at a price. Analysts have been relentlessly plumbing the movie's success for deeper meaning.

"I can only wonder what it means that the French identify so with this movie," said Michel Wieviorka, a Paris sociologist who weighed in on a recent television talk show.

In his view, the film celebrates a France that is inward-looking, fearful of the future and lazy. He also used the word franchouillard, a pejorative that roughly translates as boorish or redneck.

If that is the image that so delights filmgoers, added Mr. Wieviorka, "it tells us a lot about the country's mood."

The mood in France is apparently very bad, which could explain why audiences are hungry for a good laugh. The government's main statistics agency measures household morale every month. Last week it reported that the French have never been more pessimistic about the future or gloomy about the present.

Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis does glamorize some boorish behaviour: getting falling-down drunk on the job, for example, and urinating in public.

It flouts the conventional wisdom as expressed by President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has exhorted the French to "work more to earn more."

It offers, instead, a rose-tinted depiction of human nature. In the big-screen land of the Ch'tis, the mailman rides a bicycle and knows his customers by name. Misunderstandings are erased with an aperitif.

As the newspaper Le Monde put it, here is reality "without its venom," a homogeneous France where everyone is named Philippe or Annabelle and where the only difference between people is their zip code.

"People love it because it's fiction," said Amélie Bourdon, a Paris graduate student in sociology who grew up in the heart of Ch'ti-land, in the northern city of Lille. "Everyone gets along. No one gets arrested. Nobody talks about immigration or unemployment. And everyone takes long lunches even though they don't seem to have real jobs."

Yet in other ways, the film may be more representative of the real France than it might first appear.

It was co-written and directed by the actor, Dany Boon, who was born Daniel Hamidou and is the son of an Algerian immigrant.

The actor playing the French Everyman, a low-level bureaucrat named Abrams who is banished to Nord-Pas-de-Calais, is also an immigrant, the Algerian-born Kad Merad.

Its emphasis on provincial identity also rings true in a country where regional languages like Breton and Basque have experienced a revival in the past 20 years and can now legally be taught in schools as second languages.

"Growing up, we thought that speaking Ch'ti was just for our grandmothers and not for modern times," said Antoine Calle, a telephone salesman who moved to Paris 10 years ago from Armentières, the same northern French city where Mr. Boon was born.

"Since the film came out, though, I've become proud of my roots," he added.

"Everybody here comes from somewhere else, and so what if we want to pronounce some words differently?"

In an interview broadcast on Sunday on French state television, Mr. Boon was asked if his film was "anti-bling bling," meaning an antidote to the flashy lifestyle that some critics attribute to Mr. Sarkozy.

The filmmaker agreed. "What we need now," he said, "is an enormous amount of tenderness and laughter."

Special to The Globe and Mail