Are the French not very nice?

I guess nobody is, really.

I watched two movies on The Criterion Channel, Diary of a Country Priest and a British movie set in rural France called Mademoiselle, about sexually repressed school marm who causes some local disasters and blames one of her student's father.

Rural people in both of these movie were kind of awful.

The country priest was a young fellow assigned to his first parish. He finds himself isolated from the locals. In one scene, a tween girl drops her satchel in front of him and runs off. He picks it up, takes it to her house and hands it to her mother, making her mother think he was a grown man hanging around with her daughter which is what the girl intended.

In Mademoiselle, a monstrous school teacher struggles to open a floodgate to flood a farm. A man risks his life to save the animals and then is accused of causing it.

I've read that small town folk seem very nice, but that just means they'll become enraged if you're rude to them. Then they'll kill you. Small towns in the U.S. often have higher murder rates than the big cities. In small towns, you're more likely to be murdered by someone you know, and it'll probably be because they think you insulted them in some way. Honor killings.

You'd think small towns would be good settings for action films. You have murderous armed locals combined with tiny, barely competent police forces. They'd be like Westerns or samurai movies.