Palace Cinemas are the new owners of Ballina Fair Cinemas say they are proud to be preserving Ballina’s cherished community cinema, where they’ll continue bringing exceptional movie experiences to Ballina audiences.
And this week at the Palace Ballina, the school holidays reign supreme with Elemental, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and The Little Mermaid.
At Palace Byron Bay there’s a real treat this week; a film that came for the fabulous French Film Festival and stayed.
Driving Madeleine (Une belle course) is a 2022 French-Belgian drama film directed by Christian Carion.
The film stars Line Renaud as 92 year-old Madeleine who is leaving her suburban home to enter an aged-care facility on the other side of Paris; en route, she asks taxi driver Charles (Dany Boon) to take a detour.
Charles knows it will be a good fare when he picks her up and is everything from annoyed, to amused, to tender when he finds she is in no hurry to reach her new home and asks him to go via various locations around the city that have been significant in her life.
This warm and wonderful film is basically a two-person show, the rest of the cast blending in and out of the action seamlessly, more props than characters, only because the performance of Renaud and Boon is so riveting and space consuming, there’s no room to acknowledge anyone else.
Extraordinarily, Renaud’s performance is of a woman her actual age – many nonagenarian’s would struggle to leave the house each day and she must be acknowledged for her stellar contribution to this film.
A seemingly simple taxi ride across Paris evolves into a profound meditation on the realities of the driver, whose personal life is in shambles, and his fare, an elderly woman whose warmth belies her shocking past.
This film does wend its way to an inevitable and reasonably predictable conclusion, but as with life, it is the journey in this film and not the destination, that leaves it mark.
Go and see it – just go!
Driving Madeleine screens at Palace Byron this week.
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