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 — by then ninety-four years old — gave the most internationally celebrated screen performance of her career in this role; she 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 across the preceding seventy-five years.

Renaud's casting was a deliberate biographical decision: the central character's age and her postwar Parisian biography were deliberately constructed around Renaud's own real-life experience as a Resistance-era survivor and Paris cabaret performer. Carion has been outspoken in interviews that the screenplay was substantially rewritten in collaboration with Renaud after she signed on, with elements of her own biography incorporated into the central narrative. Renaud died in May 2025 at age ninety-six, two years after the film's release; Driving Madeleine is now widely treated as her cinematic memorial.

The supporting cast pairs Renaud with Dany Boon — France's most commercially successful comedy lead of the past twenty years, having directed and starred in Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (2008), the highest-grossing French film ever. The pairing of Boon and Renaud across two generations of French popular entertainment was widely treated as one of the structural successes of the production. Cinematography is by Pierre Cottereau and the score is by Philippe Rombi. The film grossed over €4 million at the French box office and is the most internationally distributed Carion feature since Joyeux Noël (2005).