Anne Emond’s Peak Everything (Amour Apocalypse) is a personal letter as much as a movie to recall the Quebec director’s severe COVID-era depression in Montreal.
“I would say in the beginning, I had to save myself, a little bit. That’s how it started,” a candid Emond tells The Hollywood Reporter about the inspiration for her sixth movie, a dark romantic comedy, set for a world premiere in Cannes. Peak Everything centers on Adam, a French-speaking and overwhelmed kennel owner played by Patrick Hivon who struggles with deep depression and high eco-anxiety about the end of the world as if an asteroid was set to destroy life as we know it.
But that’s until, as the world trembles, Adam falls instantly and inextricably in love with Tina, an English-speaking customer service rep for a light therapy lamp company in Ontario, played by Piper Perabo. “I am Adam,” Emond insists as Peak Everything was inspired by her COVID-era purgatory in 2020 while on lock down in Montreal.
“I felt depressed, more than that, a depression, I wasn’t doing well. I know a lot of people suffer from mental health. I was 40 years old, I thought I was safe, I wasn’t doing great at the beginning of the pandemic,” she recalled. To help get over her malaise, Emond tried running and meditation, as does Adam in her film, but without success.
But a screenwriter friend gave Emond a light therapy lamp during the pandemic that had a customer support phone number. She never rang the lamp company’s hot line, but in Peak Everything Adam does, only to discover at the other end of the phone a soft, reassuring voice from Tina that calms his nerves and stirs his romantic juices.
And when a natural disaster halts their call, an alarmed Adam jumps in his car to get to Tina. Peak Everything has a distinctive visual style filled with poetic, quirky scenes where Adam and Tina at first find one another, and then discover pleasure and purpose in their comedic adventures and flirtations.
And while Emond deliberately portrayed Tina early on in her film as vivacious and quirky, Perabo’s character is soon revealed to have deeper complexities and challenges. “Tina may be a little stronger and solid, but she also has her problems and she’s surrounded by people with real troubles and problems,” Emond says of Tina being more than a damsel in distress with no desires of her own.
Peak Everything is also a fable about a man’s emotional collapse amid a world facing environmental catastrophe and ruin, as the film echoes again Emond having fears for her mental health and climate change during the pandemic.
“It’s like the Earth was doing as bad as me, and that’s how it is for Adam,” the director recounts. To that end, Emond includes archival footage of forest wildfires and melting icebergs in her film as Adam braves a storm with heavy winds and pelting rain towards the end of Peak Everything during an iconic go get the guy scene.
That’s because Emond never wanted her self-healing film to be a downer. “It’s a tender film. It’s a love story. I want people to smile, and I still believe in love, and I still love human beings and everything. But still, the film is saying we’re facing real challenges,” the director explains.
Peak Everything is also a bilingual film as it marks Emond for the first time going beyond French-language movie making to include English-speaking characters. “It’s super Canadian. We’re a bilingual country. Why not use it? We all speak English all the time in Montreal,” she says.
Peak Everything will now have its world premiere at Cannes as part of its Directors’ Fortnight program, a date with destiny for her film that Emond admits fills her with joy and anxiety. “The day they called me, I was like, ‘Oh My God, it’s amazing,’ and I was jumping and happy,” she recalls.
But Emond being very much Adam, the director also feels high anxiety ahead of her film’s launch in France. “I became super anxious. Joy became anxiety super fast,” Emond recalls.
But Peak Everything, in its commentary on a world in chaos and threatened by climate change, could hit the zeitgeist in Cannes. “I’m the worst person to know what I did, but I’m under the impression the film is coming out at the perfect time. Everyone in the film is overwhelmed. Everyone is over the top and don’t understand how things work anymore,” Emond explains.
“We’re all going crazy and there’s AI and there’s climate change and there’s (Donald) Trump, and I wanted the film to reflect that,” she adds. And Emond sees filmmakers and other artists as an answer to our chaotic times in possibly taking audiences out of their comfort zones and raising awareness about prevailing challenges and injustices.
‘We’re in a bad position, but at least I believe fiction might be important to deal with the challenges that are coming,” she argues. Peak Everything is produced by Metafilms, the same banner behind Matthew Rankin’s Cannes prize-winning absurdist drama Universal Language.
The ensemble cast for Peak Everything includes Connor Jessup, Gilles Renaud, Elizabeth Mageren, Eric K. Boulianne and Gord Rand and Indie Sales will be shopping the film in Cannes.
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