Driving Madeleine

Christian Carion's Driving Madeleine (French: Une belle course) won Line Renaud the Best Actress prize at the Beijing International Film Festival in 2023 and was nominated for the Japan Academy Prize for Best Foreign Language Film at the 47th Japan Academy Awards in 2024. Renaud, then ninety-four, had been a fixture of French popular entertainment since the late 1940s as a chanteuse and stage performer, but had appeared only intermittently in films over the preceding seventy-five years. This became the most internationally celebrated screen performance of her career.

The casting was biographical by design. The central character's age and postwar Parisian history were built around Renaud's own experience as a Resistance-era survivor and Paris cabaret performer, and Carion has said in interviews that the screenplay was substantially rewritten with Renaud after she signed on, folding parts of her life into the story. Driving Madeleine gives that life a fitting late chapter on screen.

Opposite her is Dany Boon, France's most commercially successful comedy lead of the past twenty years, who directed and starred in Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (2008), the highest-grossing French film ever. Putting two generations of French popular entertainment in the same taxi is the production's best idea, and it works. Pierre Cottereau shot the film and Philippe Rombi wrote the score. It grossed over €4 million at the French box office and has travelled further abroad than any Carion feature since Joyeux Noël (2005).