A fourth collaboration between French funnyman Dany Boon and one-time music-hall sensation Line Renaud (who played his mother in 2008 Euro-hit Bienvenue Chez Les Ch’tis), this two-hander has a strong conceit: Madeleine (Renaud) relives her life in the backseat of the cab driving her through Paris to a nursing home, with troubled chauffeur Charles (Boon) as her confessor. The film’s gaze is fixed in the rear-view mirror far more than the Before Sunset-style dalliance it occasionally resembles, but it’s not straightforwardly nostalgic.
Madeleine’s tale starts off rose-tinted: played in flashback by Alice Isaaz, she has a wartime romance with an American soldier, which produces a son. But after her Yank beau heads back over the Atlantic, she takes up with wrong ’un Ray (Jérémie Laheurte), who resents the kid and wants her for himself. To Charles’s incredulity, she stomachs the beatings he hands out, until one day Ray backhands her child. Which is when this demure theatre-dresser goes unexpectedly medieval on his ass.
Tapping the common realisation that seemingly-benign little old ladies are storehouses of crazy life experience, Madeleine’s harrowing testimony offsets the cosier notes of golden-era nostalgia that director Christian Carion (Joyeux Noël) also likes to hit. It handily chimes with the current French debate about femicide, but the film’s own link to its present-day frame is a bit tenuous and conventional. Madeleine’s perseverance and twinkly wisdom wakes Charles from his beleaguered self-absorption in his drowning debt problems. Cue scenes of mild escapism, like when the pair enrage half of Paris by blocking a street so she can go pee.
Both of the leads keep it low-key, with 95-year-old Renaud’s unfussy reminiscences dotted with defiant irony, and the initially unforthcoming Boon opening up under her cajoling as naturally as a flower. “Know what you are? A huge romantic who hides it well,” she tells him. Driving Madeleine for its part doesn’t really hide much, wringing us for full hankie potential in a somewhat inevitable final twist. But like Charles’s €292 cab fare, it feels mostly well-earned thanks to the sincere performances.
• Driving Madeleine is released on 17 November in UK cinemas.
