Line Renaud and Dany Boon in Driving Madeleine [Jean-Claude Lother]

DRIVING MADELEINE
Directed by Christian Carion
Certificate:15
☆☆☆☆

A LIFETIME of stories to share and a sense that the time to do so is limited – this heavy atmosphere hangs over a wholly original and surprising film that thumps the viewer with unexpected emotional traps.

Madeleine (Line Renaud) has been collected by grumpy Parisian cabbie Charles (Dany Boon), who doesn’t yet know it but could do with a voice from the back seat to take his mood off his trials and tribulations.

He hates driving12 hours a day, hates being abused by drunk passengers, scraping just enough to pay for the car and barely feed his family.

As he mopes through traffic lights and leans on his horn with moody abandon, he receives a call from base telling him there is a fare on the other side of the city, an arduously traffic-ridden journey, but that he can turn his meter on now as he heads there.

Waiting outside her closed-up home is Madeleine. We learn she is leaving her house for the last time, aged 92, and is going, unwillingly, into an older persons housing complex.

She begins by asking Charles if he wouldn’t mind taking the odd detour en route – she is in no hurry to arrive at her destination, and would like to soak up as much of her old haunts while she still can.

It appears at this point we are going to be treated to a sweet inter-generational friendship, where Charles learns something profound about living for the moment from the elderly lady directed him.

But instead, Christian Carion’s film takes on a more nuanced and deeper flavour.

Madeleine recounts her life story, and we learn of a tryst with an American GI (Elie Kaempfen) at the Liberation of Paris that led to her son Mathieu, being born.

We hear of an abusive marriage to Ray (Jérémie Laheurte) and her desperate reaction to being assaulted and raped. You will not be ready for what plays out, but you will be captivated by it.

Leads Renaud and Boon are brilliant, thoroughly believable, never overplaying it for sentimentality, and clearly learning life lessons from one another as the meter ticks.

This is a moving piece of storytelling, with a personal narrative that illustrates the experiences of women in the 20th century, and the violent inequalities they faced.