At a Cannes Film Festival in which many films have taken on a dark and even apocalyptic tone, only one actually has the word apocalypse in the title — and it’s a romantic comedy. Maybe that’s the state of the world today, that the end of the world can even intrude on a boy-meets-girl scenario the way it does in French Canadian director Anne Émond’s “Amour apocalypse,” which also used the English title “Peak Everything” when it premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at Cannes on Sunday.
The film is the story of an unusual couple, but it’s also the story of the crippling anxiety that can come from living in a world that seems to be on the verge of falling apart at any moment. Coming from the same production company responsible for last year’s delightful Fortnight winner, “Universal Language,” it takes the anxieties that underlie any romantic comedy and blow them up to global proportions. It’s one thing to fashion a rom-com around social anxiety and the fear of rejection; it’s quite another to make one in the face of a crippling certainty that the planet is about to be destroyed.
But that’s the nagging feat that 45-year-old Adam faces. As played by Patrick Hivon, Adam initially seems like a mild-mannered, socially awkward and ineffectual guy, with job running a kennel and a co-worker who gives him a hand job while they’re out walking the dogs, and then says, “Don’t get any ideas.” But Adam doesn’t seem to have any ideas; he just goes along rather than put up any resistance.
This is the comedy of discomfort, played deadpan and deliberately stilted. Adam is down in the dumps, so he orders a triangular therapeutic lamp online — and when he sees that the lamp includes calls to a helpline, he calls the number and tells the woman who answers, “There’s a deep sadness inside of me. It’s like a rock.”
There’s a pause before the helpline employee, Tina, says gently, “This is a technical support line. If you experience any difficulties with the product, I can help you.”
Still, Tina rallies after the embarrassing start, and the two bond over both wanting to live in a different time. And later, after a session with a psychiatrist where Adam rants about global warming and what scientists call “peak everything,” he calls the helpline again in search of Tina. “You’re so great,” he tells her. “Are you an AI or something?”
She insists that she’s not, but in the conversations her voice is crystal clear, without any of the phone-line filtering or noise that would normally be added in a film’s mix. She’s inside his head, it seems, and she’s too perfect. And yet when an earthquake strikes the town where Tina lives, impulsively Adam drives there and finds her — and she is indeed a real woman, played by Piper Perabo. Spotting her eating a powdered sugar donut at the community center to which everyone has been evacuated, Adam knows he’s found his angel, though he won’t learn until later that she’s married and has kids.
Complications, as they say, ensue. There’s a crazy uncle, a drug bust, a few more climate-change rants and a variety of ecological disasters: the earthquake, a heat wave, a snowstorm, lighting. The film veers between dry, deadpan humor and slapstick, and between the playful and didactic. By the time Émond shifts to slow motion and brings in a pop song, you pretty much have to embrace the silliness and understand that in a world on the brink, you shouldn’t worry about what makes sense and what doesn’t.
The film meanders at times, without the controlled tone that made “Universal Language” so appealing last year. But it eventually settles into a gentle melancholy with a side of fatalism, at least until the mother of all storms hits. “Is this really the end?” Tina asks at one moment of catastrophe overload. “I really don’t know,” Adam replies, and the audience may feel the same way in a movie that crams a lot into its 100 minutes.
But that means it’s a true film for an anxious time, essentially an end-of-the-world comedy in which a suicide attempt can be set to a French-language version of “Needles and Pins” sung by Petula Clark, and a film that takes its cue from its lead character, whose neuroses, fears and anxieties are all over the map. The phrase peak everything pretty much describes “Peak Everything,” the apocalyptic rom-com we didn’t know we needed.
