Driving Madeleine (2024)
Director: Christian Carion Run Time: 91 min. Release Year: 2022
Starring: Alice Isaaz, Dany Boon, Gwendoline Hamon, Hadriel Roure, Line Renaud
Country: France
Language: French with English subtitles
About the film:
Official Selection, 2022 Toronto Film Festival
Official Selection, 2023 Palm Springs Film Festival
A seemingly simple taxi ride across Paris evolves into a profound meditation on the realities of the driver and his fare, a 92-year-old woman whose warmth belies her shocking past. Charles (Dany Boon) is a taxi driver in Paris, and he is having a very bad day. Enter Madeleine (Line Renaud), an immaculately groomed nonagenarian, who informs Charles that the trip today will not be a direct one. She is moving into a nursing home and would like to make some stops along the way predicting that this might be her last car ride through the city. Their ride takes them through the momentous locations of her life and their brief friendship deepens as Madeleine listens to Charles confess his own worries.
Boon, an actor best known for his comedic work, creates a dramatic portrait of a frustrated man facing a personal crisis of epic proportions. His darker, sharper edges allow Renaud (renowned for decades in France as a singer) to shine as the pure shimmering light that is Madeleine, reminding us that inside every seemingly benign elderly woman we might pass on the street is a warrior, a nurturer, and a spirited adventurer
About the filmmaker:
Christian Carion is a French film director and screenwriter. The Girl from Paris (2001), his first film and an homage to his origins growing up in the north of France, received a César Award nomination for Best First Feature Film. Carion followed up with his internationally acclaimed second feature Joyeux Noël (2005), which screened out of competition at the Cannes Film
Festival and was nominated for both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe in the Best Foreign Film category. His other films include Farewell (2009), Come What May (2015), Mon Garçon (2017) and the English remake My Son (2021), and his latest feature, Driving Madeleine.