Family is Family (La ch'tite famille)

Valentin D (Dany Boon) has it all.  He and his beautiful wife Constance (Laurence Arné) live a sumptuous lifestyle in a stunning Parisian apartment, funded by their hugely successful furniture design company which charges the richest clientele a small fortune for the privilege of owning their pieces.  All he lacks in life is a family, claiming he is an orphan.

That claim is exposed when his estranged mother (Line Renaud) turns up to celebrate her 80th birth day with him, conned into coming by her other son, Gus (Guy Lecluyse), who wants a loan from his wealthy sibling.  Accompanied by Gus' wife Louloute (Valérie Bonneton) and daughter Britney (Juliane Lepoureau) they turn up at an exhibition of the work of Valentin and Constance, exposing not just the orphan lie, but his roots as well.The family speak a northern dialect that is almost indecipherable to the sophisticated Paris set, and Valentin's origins lie in a desolate scrap yard.

When Valentin gets injured, and wakes from a coma with his memory damaged and speaking that same old dialect, there's confusion all round.  Can his business survive?  Will Constance be able to cope with the stranger he's become?  And how much does his family mean to him now?

Cue cutesy tale of misunderstandings, family surprises, love, hate and morality.  Predictable at times, and often lacking subtlety (there are some tiresome recurring jokes, and the message that we can't escape our roots is battered into the audience with a mallet), it still has a lot of charm, and plenty of laughs.  With so many jokes played out through differences in language I've no doubt lost a lot in having to read subtitles, but they do their best to convey the humour in the situation (even if it does get a bit "Allo Allo" at times), but there are some very funny scenes, especially when Valentin is taken to a diction coach.  The performances do little to raise the script above average, although Bonneton does a good job of maximising her laughs.  Not the most memorable of movies, but a decent stab at a light comedy.

Worth staying to the end however - the outtakes shown with the closing credits are genuinely hilarious.