Film Review | ‘Driving Madeleine’, a Short Ride Through a Long Life

Notwithstanding its reflexive throwback echo to Driving Miss Daisy — minus the critical racial component — the French film Driving Madeleine carves out a unique narrative route all its own. A simple synopsis, concerning a taxi driver who takes on an elderly customer for a long drive through Paris, learning about her life along the way, does little justice to the terrain covered or the depth of humanity covered.

Literally, the trip and the film itself are non-linear journeys about much more than the trajectory from point A to point B and ends up a surprisingly engaging and artistic feel-good film with dark corners. That delicate balance might be expected from writer-director Christian Carion, whose most well-known work to date was 2005’s Joyeux Noël (Merry Christmas), winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar. In this sensitive portrayal of the famed holiday ceasefire in the WWI trenches, pockets of warmth and conviviality between American and German soldiers were overshadowed by awareness of impending doom and an end to merriment.

In Driving Madeleine, for our feisty 92-year-old protagonist (beautifully realized by Line Renaud), the journey from her fine Parisian home across the city to her final fate in a nursing home amounts to an end to her life as a free, self-willing woman. Her easy wit and conversational poise emerges soon after hailing the cab driven by Charles (Dany Boon), and laying out details of rich, tragic and ultimately triumphant life.

Director Carion finds ways to move seamlessly between the elderly Madeleine’s taxi ride-lubed repartee and telling flashback material, through the gauzy haze of memory’s filter. Alice Isaaz stars as the young Madeleine, headed from love with an American GI at the giddy close of WWII to darker twists in life. The pivotal turn in her saga is a fate-altering moment of satisfying revenge against domestic violence. We also learn that Madeleine later became a prominent activist opposing said violence.

And it’s more than a one-way trip of a story: she prods Charles into confessions about his own past and current life, sometimes slyly alluded to in phone calls from his home front. A bond naturally builds, culminating in an off-the-clock dinner and promises to maintain contact in her uncertain future.

Apart from the inventive storytelling structure at hand, making Driving Madeleine an arthouse-worthy film with hanky-ready emotionality, the film also revels in the act of giving some overdue screen time to the fully-lived back stories of the elderly. Characters of a certain age deserve love and a close-up, too.

Driving Madeleine opens Friday, January 12 at the Riviera Theatre. View trailer here.