She’s 92, he’s 46, exactly half her age. She is going on a one-way journey to an old people’s home, and he is the cab driver – trying to figure out how to pay his debts – who takes her across Paris. It will surprise no one that she convinces him to take her on a journey to revisit the crucial landmarks of her life and that they end up bonding. That’s the premise of Driving Madeleine (the French title is Une Belle Course), directed by Christian Carion, which opened throughout Israel on January 4. It’s a charming, if predictable, movie redeemed and distinguished by two amazing lead performances by Line Renaud and Dany Boon. The English title was presumably chosen to evoke memories of Driving Miss Daisy, but this movie tells a very different story, although it does feature an older woman and younger driver.
A treat for French cinema connoisseurs
French cinema and music fans know of Renaud, who is actually as old (she was born in 1928) as the character of Madeleine. She has had a long career as a film and stage actress and a singer and was married to French composer Louis “Loulou” Gaste. Renaud also had an international music career, appearing on American television shows and performing in Las Vegas for a number of years in the 1960s. She was also known for her activism on behalf of those suffering from AIDS, and – together with Elizabeth Taylor – founded an organization to help them. For American audiences today, she is probably best known for an arc on Call My Agent! Renaud brings more than 70-plus years of presence to her performance and she holds the screen here in this story of a woman looking back.
Madeleine is optimistic and encouraging to the distracted, dispirited Charles (Boon), and Renaud manages to make this aspect of the character credible, while nearly any other actress would seem to be spouting empty platitudes.
She and Charles start off sparring, as he is distracted by his financial problems and she is mournful over the fact that she can no longer live on her own. But he agrees to take her through a neighborhood where she used to live and there, she finds a plaque dedicated to Jewish victims of the Nazis in 1943 (the plaque notes they were killed on October 7 of that year) and explains that her father was killed here. She speaks of her anger at his death, but any further mention of the Holocaust or a Jewish identity for the character is dropped at this point, in a missed opportunity.
We then learn how she was romanced and impregnated by an American GI who abandoned her and that she later married an abusive man. This leads the movie into a tabloid-esque detour and while there’s nothing wrong with that in principle – it could have made the movie livelier – the conception of this film is too tasteful to create really enjoyable melodrama. In a certain way, Madeleine’s scandalous past is just a distraction from the real theme of the movie, which is about what lessons life teaches you when you look back on it. It might have been more interesting to show a woman who had a fairly ordinary life contemplating her mortality than the elaborate and shocking backstory Madeleine is given.
Acting that suspends disbelief
But no matter how unlikely the plot becomes at times, Boon gives a believable and appealing performance as the driver whose life is changed by this encounter with Madeleine. Boon is best known as a comic actor, but his work here is so good that had I not known, I would never have guessed. He is also a writer and director, who has made such comedies as Welcome to the Sticks. Boon, of mixed Algerian-French descent, reportedly converted to Judaism over 20 years ago. While his Algerian heritage is never mentioned in the movie, he does seem to have an outsider vibe as he plays the convincingly stressed-out driver, whose inability to make ends meet threatens his family life.
Renaud and Boon work together so beautifully that you will forgive the contrivance at the heart of the story, as well as a tacked-on epilogue that adds little, and embrace their emotional Parisian road trip.