Bowling

Non, this isn't Les règles du jeu ou La Grande illusion, but it's one very well done, very funny comedy. Based on a true story that I remember, it tells the tale of the hospital in Carhaix, the only real city in the interior of Brittany, and the Sarkozy government's efforts to shut down the maternity ward there. Closing the maternity ward in the only hospital in the region would effectively have put the decline and death of the interior of Brittany in high gear, because young families would have left and no new ones would have moved in. (There has been steady outmigration from Central Brittany since the creation of the French railway system in the second half of the 19th century.) So the personnel of the hospital go on strike, as only the French in general and the Bretons in particular can, and the results are hilarious. It helps if you've lived in Brittany, but I imagine this movie can be enjoyed by anyone. I went to see it twice in the theater, and it's not very often that I do that.

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I watched it again tonight on French TV, and it certainly holds up on a third viewing. It is a wonderful example, among other things, of the French way of resisting central governmental control, something not all that different from what we used to call "states' rights" here in the US - though regional resistance to Parisian bureaucracy is usually in defense of socially liberal rather than conservative ideas.

It also shows how such resistance can bring out feelings of regional pride that the central French government has spend the last 400 years trying, not very successfully, to obliterate.