Line Renaud and Dany Boon in Driving Madeleine (Cohen Media Group)

The English title of Christian Carion’s Une belle course deliberately harkens back to Driving Miss Daisy, 1989’s Oscar–winning best picture and a safe, respectable melodrama about an elderly White woman and her Black driver. There are superficial similarities, but Carion goes to a different, darker place.

Middle-aged Parisian cabbie Charles has problems: He’s deeply in debt, he’s almost ready to lose his license for piling up traffic infractions, and he rarely sees his wife and young daughter. When Madeleine, a spry, ornery 92-year-old, promises him extra cash to drive her throughout the city for hours on end, he begrudgingly accepts the fare. After suffering an injurious fall, Madeleine must live in a nursing home—but she wants one last drive through her beloved Paris beforehand.

As Charles drives her around the city, memories are triggered for Madeleine (maybe Carion and cowriter Cyril Gély named her after Proust’s famous cake), which are depicted in flashbacks. Young Madeleine works for her mother as a seamstress in a theater, where she falls in love with an American GI, but is left pregnant and heartbroken when he returns to the States. She then marries the handsome Ray (Jérémie Laheurte), who soon starts beating her in front of her young son, Mathieu. After enduring the abuse for a while, her violent reprisal puts her on trial, where she’s sentenced to 25 years in prison. She gets out after 13. Shortly after, she reunites with Mathieu (Thomas Alden), now a photojournalist about to cover the Vietnam War. You can guess what happens next.

Carion obviously embraces the contrivances he’s built into Madeleine’s dramatically eventful life. On one hand, it lets Charles realize his own problems are less important by comparison, which helps tie the dramatic threads together neatly and, it must be admitted, satisfyingly at the end. On the other hand, the schematic plotting includes moments that seemingly exist solely to emotionally hammer Madeleine even more. Early on, she asks Charles to stop, then gets out, and walks over to tearfully read a plaque commemorating local men, including her father, who were murdered by the Nazis. It feels like the script piles on tragedies, even when Carion directs a relatively restrained scene. More illuminating is the re-creation of an era, not so long ago, when women, particularly those who were married, had few if any legal rights, however harrowing their lives were with their husbands.

Similar to Daisy, Carion’s film is anchored by superb acting. As young Madeleine, Alice Isaaz is winning and energetic, charmingly complementing the brilliant performance of Line Renaud as the older Madeleine, a true force of nature. (Renaud is actually older than the 92-year-old she is playing, but seems a good 20 years younger, in looks and spirit.) And the always reliable Dany Boon transforms Charles, who’s one-dimensionally written, into a foil who’s realistically crusty but sympathetic.

All three actors make Driving Madeleine—along with its wonderful views of Paris—a picturesque and even poignant journey worth taking. (Too bad the original title, Une belle course, wasn’t anglicized more evocatively as something like A Great Run.)