DRIVING MADELEINE - Mark Reviews Movies

Driving Madeleine, Cohen Media Group

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 11, 2024

Two people with wholly different experiences and of completely distinct temperaments spend a day talking in Driving Madeleine. Neither wants much of anything, except the obvious. One character is the passenger in a taxi, and the other is the driver. She has somewhere to go, and he's the one to take her there. It's a long drive and longer than anticipated, given a couple of unexpected stops along the way, so to pass the time and get to know each other, the two simply talk.

The idea might sound simple, and honestly, it is. How often, really, do we get to see something like this in a movie, though? The whole enterprise is so relaxed and so to-the-point that director Christian Carion's film becomes sneakily affecting, simply because we get to know these two characters and observe how this chance encounter changes something about each of them.

We first meet Charles (Dany Boon), the cab driver, who's sick and tired of his job, driving people all around Paris and the surrounding area, but has no other skills and has no idea what he would otherwise do for a career. He's in his mid-40s, and no matter what feel-good sentiments might be bandied about, it's not as if a complete overhaul of one's life at that age is easy or feasible.

Charles is quick to anger, and that has only a little to do with city traffic. He and his wife are financially struggling, because it costs almost as much money to do his job as whatever he earns from fares. None of this may matter soon, anyway, since Charles is one traffic violation away from having his license suspended, and a cab driver without a license is nothing but out of work.

That's all we need to know about Charles, and Cyril Gely's screenplay gets all of it out of the way before he meets the passenger whose ride will take up the rest of his day. It's admirable how concisely the filmmakers establish exactly and only what's necessary for this story, and it helps, of course, that the exact and only things that matter here are the kind of people Charles and Madeleine (Line Renaud), the passenger, are.

The film's whole attention is on them. The camera never leaves both or either of them, save for some flashbacks that are still showing us Madeleine, only in her younger days. In the present, Madeleine is leaving the suburban home where she has lived for a significant portion of her life, because her health is declining in, this, her 92nd year of living. The house will be sold to help pay for her stay at nursing home. This is essentially her last day of freedom, so she's in no rush to get to the facility.

Charles is, of course, because this is, well, just another job at the start, he has to make a tough call to ask his brother for some monetary help, and he and his wife have to talk about what's to be done about their financial difficulties. The whole string of detours starts when the kindly older woman asks the quiet, fuming driver for one favor. Could he take her to the neighborhood where she grew up to see how much has stayed the same and how much of it has changed?

He agrees, because she is such a sweet lady with such a sad destination ahead of her, and from there, the whole screenplay becomes an extended conversation between the two. Madeleine has a lot to say, and by way of Renaud's presence, the character is instantly compelling and appealing. Renaud is primarily a singer by trade, acting in French movies and television with a bit more frequency in the past few decades (She spent the 1960s and '70s, as well as most of the '80s, away from acting for her musical career). If it's not too late for a professional shift, let's hope she finds her way into more roles that take advantage of what a naturally charming presence and storyteller she is on screen.

Most of the story amounts to Madeleine telling stories of her life—of a brief love affair at the end of World War II, of being a single mother, of a disastrous marriage, of a scandal (to put it mildly) that arose from that relationship and how the consequences of it changed the course of her life. Alice Isaaz plays the younger Madeleine in flashbacks, as the character raises a son and discovers that a seemingly nice man named Ray (Jérémie Laheurte) is far from that kind of person, but the longing, the regret, and the determination of Renaud's narration is what really carries these scenes.

There are a few surprises in that story, from the tragic to one moment that's downright shocking (Some credit is due to Gely for not using it to take the material in a completely different direction, as it seems the film might, considering the severity of the moment). We come to understand Madeleine in sympathetic and unlikely ways, and that's the whole and primary point. If Boon's Charles seems to become a passenger of sorts of this narrative, that's not the case, though. Boon possesses that trickiest of qualities for an actor in his performance: He listens, and more importantly, Boon turns the act of listening into a means of communicating how much this woman and her stories are changing the way he thinks.

Driving Madeleine has no great ambitions, except to allow us to listen to two engaging characters talk for a bit. The result is lovely in that simplicity.

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