An older man cajoles a young girl into his truck late one night. “Don’t murder me,” she scoffs, oblivious to the other, more insidious threats that he may represent. It’s a classic “stranger danger” setup presented by Jamie Dack in “Palm Trees and Power Lines,” her directorial debut, which she co-wrote with Audrey Findlay. Dack and Findlay’s screenplay, about the relationship between the young girl, 17-year-old Lea (Lily McInerny) and the older man, 34-year-old Tom (Jonathan Tucker) masterfully lays out the situation, with every red flag and warning sign plainly obvious, but situates the audience within Lily’s naive subjectivity so well that when she gets in the truck, we understand why.
The experience of watching “Palm Trees and Power Lines” and indeed, the journey of our young protagonist, is akin to a frog slowly being boiled. For Lea, it’s in the softly brutal manipulations of Tom, who weasels inside her mind and slowly takes control. For the audience, it’s in watching this unfold, and Dack does not let us look away or escape from what’s happening to Lea. Utilizing the “stranger danger” trope, we think this story is going a certain way — Lea’s friends snort that Tom is a “pedophile” and a “pervert” — but it’s far more than what initially meets the eye.
Dack alternates her approach to time and pacing in “Palm Trees and Power Lines,” lingering in moments that are challenging to endure, after skittering through snatched scenes of Lea’s stultifying summer break, in a bleakly dry Southern California suburb. She spends her time tanning and getting high with her friends, a group of crude, cruel teenagers, or hanging out with her mother (Gretchen Mol) who is hot or cold, depending on the state of her revolving door of boyfriends. Lea first encounters Tom in the parking lot of a diner late at night. She and her friends have dashed on the bill, and Lea has been collared by the cook. Tom comes to her rescue, and later ensures she gets home.
Tucker has an intensely piercing blue stare, which Dack weaponizes to great effect. When Tom directs his gaze at Lea, it’s as if she’s receiving all the attention and care she’s lacking in her other relationships, and she’s drawn to him, as if a flower toward the sunlight. Having endured the entitled backseat ministrations of the boys her own age, Tom’s attentiveness feels like love, but his affection masks a far greater danger, one that Dack manages to conceal until halfway through the film.
The Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman spoke of the passage of time in her films, saying, “with me, you see the time pass, and you feel it pass.” Dack takes a similar approach in the scenes between Tom and Lea — she makes us watch as Tom dials up the heat with his words. We see the bubbles start to gather around the edges of the pot as he becomes possessive, and offers to take care of her. By the time it reaches a roiling boil, Dack doesn’t permit the audience to avert their eyes. She has walked us down this path in the same way that Tom has guided Lea with his words, and Dack keeps us locked into her experience the entire time.
McInerny and Tucker have both been nominated for Independent Spirit Awards for their stark, unflinching and raw performances. Dack and Findlay also received a nomination for best first screenplay, and the film is nominated for best first feature. It’s a bold, bleak and unapologetic work exposing inescapable truths about the world, about sex and relationships and power. It is dark and deeply troubling, but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t closely inspect, in order to understand, those dynamics either, and Dack, Findlay and the actors bravely offer the audience this unique opportunity to do so.
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‘PALM TREES AND POWER LINES’
3 stars (out of 4)
Rated: R (for disturbing material, sexual violence, sexual content, drug/alcohol use, and language - all involving teens)
Running time: 1:50
How to watch: In theaters Friday
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