A fourth collaboration between French funnyman Dany Boon and one-time music-hall sensation Line Renaud (who played his mother in 2008 Euro-hit Bienvenue Chez Les Ch’tis), this two-hander has a strong conceit: Madeleine (Renaud) relives her life in the backseat of the cab driving her through Paris to a nursing home, with troubled chauffeur Charles (Boon) as her confessor. The film’s gaze is fixed in the rear-view mirror far more than the Before Sunset-style dalliance it occasionally resembles, but it’s not straightforwardly nostalgic.
Madeleine’s tale starts off rose-tinted: played in flashback by Alice Isaaz, she has a wartime romance with an American soldier, which produces a son. But after her Yank beau heads back over the Atlantic, she takes up with wrong ’un Ray (Jérémie Laheurte), who resents the kid and wants her for himself. To Charles’s incredulity, she stomachs the beatings he hands out, until one day Ray backhands her child. Which is when this demure theatre-dresser goes unexpectedly medieval on his ass.
