Director: Christian Carion (France, Belgium). Year of Release: 2022
Charles is a taxi driver in Paris. He works 14 hour days, 7 days a week, which means that he has little time to spend with his wife Karine a nurse, and their daughter Betty. Despite the long hours, he is still desperate for money, partly because while working for a taxi firm he still has to make payments on his cab. He is constantly trying to reach his richer, more successful, doctor brother on the phone, then guiltily saying it doesn’t matter when his brother finally rings back.
One day, Charles is driving a businessman who insists on telling him where to drive. Charles looks at him with a contemptuous stare, and says “you do your job, I’ll do mine”. Shortly after he drops the yuppie off, he is offered a job to take 92 year old Madeleine from one side of Paris to the other. When he meets her, Madeleine explains that she’s recently had a fall and her doctor has told her she can’t live alone. So, she’s going to a nursing home- She tells Charles to take his time.
Madeleine is eager to tell Charles about her life story, which – unusually for someone who tries to foist their history on an unwilling audience – proves to be full of interesting incidents. As a 16-year old, she had a brief fling with a GI, who returned to the States, but left her something to remember him by – her son Mathieu. Madeleine is left to find work helping out her theatre dresser mother, and hoping that mum will babysit Mathieu when she goes to the pictures.
On the rebound, Madeleine takes up with Ray, who is tall, dark, handsome, and absolutely toxic. He beats and rapes her, secure in the knowledge that in the 1950s in France (and most of the rest of the “progressive West”), women were not allowed any basic rights without the permission of their husbands. But when Ray is violent towards Mathieu, Madeleine has enough and applies a bunsen burner to his groin. She is sentenced to 25 years in prison.
While Madeleine chunters on and on, Charles only responds when he has to. When she then starts asking about his life, he is as taciturn as politeness allows. He eventually concedes that he is 46, and has never left France. Well, that’s not quite true – during the rail strike, he did take a fare to Belgium. For holidays, he, Karine and Betty go to a house in the countryside that belonged to his parents. Their relationship is strained and only just surviving.
Madeleine asks Charles to make diversions to haunts of her youth, or anywhere that will postpone her inevitable institutionalisation. After a while, the nursing home contacts them and tells them that they are already several hours late. Charles responds by telling them that they’re entering a tunnel and can’t hear any more, and inviting Medeleine to a restaurant. You shudder to think how much the taximeter is registering by now.
When I saw the trailer for Im Taxi mit Madeleine, my heart sunk in expectation of a dull paint by numbers story like Driving Miss Daisy or Green Book, where a mismatched driver and drivee share a car for long enough to learn Important Life Lessons from each other – but nothing that is too controversial. Then I saw that the cab drivers union or someone had organised a showing, so thought that maybe it would show something about real life, outside the usual film clichés.
So, how did it do? Well, better than expected – it is well-acted, and when Madeleine remembers incidents from her youth (by far the best parts of the film), it offers real dramatic tension. Having said this. we know from the start exactly where we are heading, and the default setting is cloying sentimentality. Even when dealing with serious issues like spousal abuse and rape within marriage, there is an undertone that says: “but that was in the past. Can we talk about happy things now?”
There is a scene when Charles is stopped for running a red light, which would be disastrous for him, as he only has 2 points left on his license, and without his license, he’d lose his livelihood- While a surly cop demands to see Charles’s papers, Madeleine asks to share some private time with the cop’s female partner. This is a scene which would have you revelling in the well-being of humanity if it weren’t so obvious from the start of the scene exactly what is going to happen.
Added to this, the film takes place in a Paris that is equivalent to filmic London, where every shot contains either Big Ben or the Shard. It’s established early on that Dani is an experienced driver who knows the quickest route to anywhere, so why does he continually drive alongside the Seine, or past sightseer traps like the Arc de Triomphe or the Champs d’Élysées? In the middle of Rush Hour? This is not the only indication that this is a film which privileges sentiment over authenticity.
For all its shortcomings, though, Im Taxi mit Madeleine is clearly a Force For Good. It raises Serious Issues, where it clearly supports the good guys (or, more often, good gals). It is a shocked as we are that a woman could be heavily punished for defending herself against an abusive husband. And in a film industry that privileges the young and the beautiful, it has no qualms in giving a starring room to an actor who is actually 94, and playing younger than she actually is.
In short, it ticks all the boxes. And if that’s all you need from a film (and God knows, we all have evenings when box ticking is the most we expect), it does all this very professionally. Shame about the lack of ambition, but you can’t have everything.
CinePhil 