For film buffs, it can be easy to get swept up looking for the next best thing in cinema that we forget movies don’t necessarily have to do anything groundbreaking to still be phenomenal pieces of storytelling. This is exactly the case with Peak Season, the latest film from directors Steven Kanter and Henry Loevner about two unlikely people finding each other during particularly vulnerable times in each of their lives.
Set in the breathtaking town of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the film is equal parts love story and coming-of-age into adulthood. Amy (Claudia Restrepo) and Max (Ben Coleman) have embarked on a romantic getaway in Jackson Hole to rest and relax before their upcoming wedding. Max is your typical wealthy, heterosexual white man, falling easily into the tropes of privilege and ignorance. Clearly a workaholic, he spends most of the vacation answering e-mails and phone calls and complaining to Amy about his coworkers. He constantly operates under the idea that his wealth is enough to maintain his soon-to-be wife’s love and attention, doing little else to try and understand who she is. Amy, on the other hand, is more complex. For starters, she isn’t white, and this fact alone is enough to make her more aware than Max to the quiet privileges afforded to those vacationing in Jackson Hole—not to mention their own wedding plans. When Max bails on a chance to take fly fishing lessons from a local, Amy goes anyway, spending the day with their teacher, the charming Loren (Derrick Joseph DeBlasis), on her own.
Loren is the opposite of Max in many ways. A Wyoming transplant, he lives out of his car and embodies every gorpcore cliché there is. He spends his days working odd jobs for cash—hence the flyfishing lessons—choosing how and when he spends his time. He exudes that Justin Vernon-living-in-a-cabin-in-the-woods-writing-sad-songs-about-how-his-ex-girlfriend-dumped-him ethos which makes him equal parts enticing and unattainable at once. He is untamable, which is precisely why Amy is immediately taken by him. When Max unexpectedly leaves Amy to go on a business outing for the week, she is left by herself, forced to find new ways to pass the time. Loren is the obvious answer to her lack of friendship, and the two spend a series of days together getting to know one another, their attraction to each other becoming increasingly undeniable.
Peak Season isn’t reinventing the wheel when it comes to romantic dramas about forbidden love. In many ways, it is a fairly predictable film. We immediately recognize the flyfishing lesson as the couple’s tantalizing meet-cute, and we know their affection for one another will only grow the longer Max is away. There is the obvious conversation between Amy and Loren about their exes and current partners—in which both parties try really hard to speak between the lines — and we know that eventually, Max will interrupt Loren and Amy’s one opportunity to finally tell each other how they truly feel. But even though we expect to see all of these happen (and do), the film still manages to charm us in its familiarity.
Perhaps this is because the chemistry between Restrepo and DeBlasis is palpable, and Max is such an utterly unlikeable character that it’s hard to even imagine Amy falling for him at all — something even she seems to be wondering as she watches him do his morning workout in the backyard, clearly getting the ick from his awkward gyrations — but the film also works because even in its predictability, it still manages to make room for surprise.
The end of Peak Season is what pushes the film beyond just your average romantic love triangle. Absent of dramatic mad dashes through the airport or outpourings of love in the middle of a thunderstorm, the movie, instead, lets us linger in the what-ifs. It makes clear that its message isn’t really about finding true love at all, but rather, it’s about the power of habit and how so many of us are just going through the motions of what we believe to be the right way to live our lives. Both Amy and Loren are creatures of habit, afraid to break out of their comfort zones, even if it means the possibility of something better. Peak Season, then, is less about romance and more about the unbending expectations we set for ourselves in the hopes of living that good life.
Photo courtesy of Entertainment Squad
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