Palm Trees and Power Lines Review: A Puzzling and Remarkable Debut | Sundance 2022

PAlm Trees and Power Lines, a remarkably sharp and hard-hitting debut from writer-director Jamie Dack, opens on the languid, relaxed stretch of a teenage summer. Lea, played in an impressive first turn by newcomer Lily McInerny, is 17 years old and bored. He lives with his single mother, the harassed and yearning Sandra (Gretchen Mol), somewhere in a small town on the California coast (palm trees and power lines, train tracks and modest houses) and spends his days soaking up the sun, tutorials makeup on YouTube and trips to the chain store for cheap ice cream with her lecherous best friend Amber (Quinn Frankel).

Many movies confuse the glamor and maturation of adolescence with capturing it, but Dack’s feature, developed from his 2018 short of the same name, is saturated with adolescence. The actors are cool and gangly, and Dack has an ear for the emptiness and experimental rawness of teenage conversation: the boys rank the girls they meet on a 10-point scale, the girls play games to pass the time, they joke around with farts, usually talking about nothing. . Lea spends a good portion of the first 15 minutes on her stomach: on the floor, on the floor with Amber, on the couch, on a deckchair, in the backseat of someone’s car during passionate sex with a clueless guy, and the camera is there. with her, at her level, surrounded by the smallness of her world.

So when Lea catches the eye of Tom (Jonathan Tucker), a handsome 34-year-old mechanic, at a diner, the stark difference between their ages becomes immediately apparent. Tom is muscular, graying at the temples, his cool demeanor barely concealing any nervous menace. Lea is a close girl. She sees his wink, his autonomy, his curiosity in her, as magnetic, intoxicating, special. We see a girl vulnerable to loneliness, red flags, and a cliché. Dack’s follow-up to this ominous seduction in the first half of the film is a brilliant portrait of isolation and a hunger to be seen. Through McInerny’s brown eyes and silver laugh, we see Lea come to life under his attention. We see the Tom she sees: charming, empathetic, interesting – and how lines like “You’re not like any girl I know” and “I feel like I can be open with you” are so powerful and exciting.

But the things Lea still doesn’t understand are never obscured: the possessiveness that isn’t romantic but alarming, the manipulation of said lines, the sheer innuendo of a man spending his days with a teenage girl. When Tom takes her to “his place,” a motel, for sex, Lea is initially disappointed, but turns it into desire. Dack manages to build Tom’s appeal to Lea while constantly drilling him down. His friends call him a pedophile; a waitress asks if she needs help after witnessing one of her dates, and we know she’s right.

Casting is essential here. For the relationship to be between and reject, the characters need to seem believable their age, not Hollywood 17. That was a problem with the Hulu series A Teacher, about a sexual relationship between a teacher in her mid-30s and her 17-year-old. one year student. The episodes were full of warnings and appeals, but the intimate scenes between 24-year-old actor Nick Robinson, as a student, and Kate Mara’s teacher were more exciting than disturbing; in any other show, the two could plausibly play lovers. Same with An Education, the 2009 British drama in which 24-year-old Carey Mulligan, in her breakout role, played the 16-year-old schoolgirl who has a heady relationship with a much older hustler (played by Peter Sarsgaard).

Palm Trees and Power Lines provides no such output. McInerny, bony-kneed and thin as a teenager, looks like most 17-year-olds: more girl than adult. Tom hovers over her. In a crucial scene in the silent scream of the second half of the film, Tom takes Lea to a hotel and Dack places the camera on the other side of the room, so we can see their looks as he undresses her: she is dazzled , astonished and incredulous; he greedy, lewd, misguided. There is no shimmer of sexiness here.

The final section of the film questionably dives into brutally dark material, but avoids the potholes of melodrama by remaining grounded in Lea’s flickering awareness, then devastation, at the peril of her situation. Thanks to an all-female creative team, including co-writer Audrey Findlay, producer Leah Chen Baker, and cinematographer Chananun Chotrungroj, whose moderation during an extended intimate hotel room sequence (no nudity) keeps Read frayed nerves and quiet horror at the center of a devastating encounter. We are aware of his exploitation, the shock and disappointment and confusion of it, never exploiting his body.

It’s trite to say that a debut performance is a revelation, but the entire movie just doesn’t work without McInerny, who is completely convincing as a child on an emotional precipice. It’s an amazingly calibrated twist, one of barely covered thrills that eventually slip. In the end, I had a hole in my stomach, desperate to know how Lea proceeds from the disappointment that dawns. Summer evenings are still light, but there is a heaviness to this unnerving and meticulous debut, knowing the events that Lea will litigate with herself for years to come.