Palm Trees and Power Lines

Lea is seventeen and on her summer holiday. She and her mother live in the same house but do not talk. Her friends are tiresome. One day they run out on a restaurant bill and a man gets her out of it. Tom is thirty four. He is courteous, calm, he listens. He asks her things nobody asks. They start seeing each other. He picks her up in his car, buys her food, is patient. Then he asks her to stay at a motel. At every step Lea thinks this is her own choice. Jamie Dack directs and co-wrote the screenplay. Lily McInerny plays Lea and Jonathan Tucker plays Tom; Gretchen Mol is in the cast. It is an American production. The film was developed from a short of the same name Dack had made earlier. It won the directing award in the American dramatic section at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. It is Lily McInerny's first feature role. The matter it treats is method of approach; the film shows exploitation not as a sudden event but as the building of trust over weeks. The narrative gives the viewer information before Lea has it, and that gap is the source of the discomfort. The camera keeps its distance; the scenes are long and the cutting sparse. The last section is direct and the film aestheticises the violence nowhere. Its limit is the watching; the subject is heavy, one scene is hard to bear, and the film offers no hope. Who it is for: viewers who like American independent cinema and uncomfortable realist narrative. Who it is not for: it is shattering, slow, and the ending merciless.