There were two things that hooked me when I first saw Palm Trees and Power Lines, an unnerving portrait of the grooming of a teenage girl, at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. First, that the film, which is finally getting limited and on-demand release this week in the US, was one of most evocative depictions of suburban adolescence that I’d seen – a languid summer of couch hangs and knobby knees, afternoon ice cream and sex jokes, a whole lot of lying around and talking about nothing. And second, that the portrayal of the relationship between 17-year-old Lea, played by the 22-year-old yet younger-looking Lily McInerny, and 34-year-old Tom, played by a convincingly thirtysomething Jonathan Tucker, was a remarkably tricky balancing act, one that has stuck with me for over a year.
Writer/director Jamie Dack’s feature debut accomplishes a fraught double vision: you can see, in the film’s entrancing first act, why Lea is attracted to Tom, a construction contractor she first encounters at a late-night diner. You can also see he’s manipulating her. Lea is bored and isolated, frustrated with her working single mother and the tight hems of her world. Tom has a car and a job and answers to no one. He takes her fledgling interests – in singing, in worrying about the future, in herself – seriously. The boys she hangs around, who crudely rank attractiveness and fumble at sex in the backseat of a car, are fresh-faced and adolescent-metabolism thin. Tom has muscles and moves with assurance. He’s a thrill, his attention both intoxicating and validating. He’s also clearly, to anyone watching, ridden with red flags. (Lea can see it a little, too – she hides the truth from her friends, who half-jokingly call him a “perv”.)
It’s one of the best, most sensitive and devastating, depictions of both grooming, the magnetism and wrongness of this particular age-gap relationship, that I’ve seen – the result of “a delicate balance that I had to hit right”, Dack told the Guardian. There have to be “moments where you’re kind of appalled by it, and even grossed out, and then other moments when you can really feel their chemistry”. It’s clear how Lea sees a forbidden, misunderstood romance; we see something sinister in the way he looks at her, in how he diminishes her mother’s character, in the fact that “his place” is a sketchy motel.
“The thing that I really wanted to avoid was people thinking that she was stupid for ignoring these red flags,” said Dack. The goal was to “really set up the vulnerabilities that she has that make her ripe for this sort of thing to happen.” Lea, too, initially balks at his motel room, but we watch in real time as she subsumes that doubt in curiosity, trust and desire. “Every need of hers, in a way, was being met though this relationship,” said McInerny, “and it’s only in hindsight that you realize how manipulative each interaction was.”
The specter of hindsight – the film leaves a lingering impression of events Lea will be reprocessing and relitigating in her head for years – is personal for Dack, who grew up in suburban Maryland and began writing the script for the 2018 short that eventually expanded into the feature based on her own history. What initially began as an exploration of an age-gap relationship morphed into something more sinister and specific as the #MeToo movement brought forth a cascade of re-evaluations and revelations, patterns that complicated memories of consent or complicity. “It changed how I looked back on that relationship I had had,” said Dack. “All of a sudden, I was like, wait a second. And I think I did that for a lot of women – there are relationships that we thought we were in control of, or ‘this guy likes me because I’m mature.’” Between age and #MeToo, “you all of a sudden go ‘there are ways in which I was being manipulated, or there were ways in which this was not right.’”
Dack had written many drafts of a script about an inappropriate age-gap relationship, but around the beginning of the MeToo movement in 2017, she started to look back on it differently. She added a more concrete and overt narrative of grooming to the script, “because I wanted to use the protagonist as a proxy for my younger self as I kind of explored what could have happened if this man’s intentions had been different.”
Casting was essential for this to work. Most film and TV about age-gap relationships get tripped up by the plausibility of the age difference, and thus the tone of the power differential. Such was the issue with An Education, the 2009 movie in which 24-year-old Carey Mulligan played a 16-year-old wooed by an older conman. Same for the 2020 Hulu series A Teacher, which bookended episodes with Rainn warnings about grooming but framed its relationship between a high school student, played by 24-year-old Nick Robinson, and Kate Mara’s thirtysomething teacher as sexy, charged. In casting for Lea, Dack searched for a newcomer – someone people would have no prior associations with, so viewers could “get lost in her performance and feel like they were watching a real teenager and not someone they’ve seen before playing this teenager”, said Dack. “I get really taken out of movies and TV where it’s these 25-year-olds playing high-schoolers.” McInerny was 19 when she first read for the role, 22 during filming, but she looks so small compared with Tom, so young, more child than adult, that you can never not think there’s something fundamentally gross about his interest in her.
Instead, the intimate scenes are staged to primarily witness Lea’s processing of emotions – thrill, confusion, arousal; eventually, in the film’s gut-punch of a final act, horror, fear and disillusionment. “This is a film about a girl being exploited, and so I didn’t want to do that anymore than what was just already happening in the story,” said Dack. There is no nudity; the camera is angled to primarily capture Lea’s experience, rather than either his or her body. During one devastating late-stage scene, the camera focuses on Lea’s face as the encounter plays out in excruciating real time.
Since the advent of #MeToo, larger films and shows have employed intimacy coordinators to carefully choreograph and communicate boundaries for sex scenes. Dack and McInerny described a similar intention and environment on the set of their small independent film. “I think the key to all of it was open channels of communication among the three of us, and just becoming really comfortable,” said Dack. McInerny described the intimate scenes, ranging from making out in a car to chilling exploitation, as “all extremely choreographed”, and “the best thing you can expect out of an intimate scene – there are no surprises, but there is room to live authentically”.
“It was really helpful to have a woman behind the camera for those scenes, as well,” she added. The camera crew was majority female, including cinematographer Chananun Chotrungroj, which is still rare. “When there is a woman closest to you, aside from your scene partner, and especially in that hotel room scene, it was hugely helpful.”
The quiet scream of the film’s final third has lingered for me for months in part because it never breaches the terrain of physical violence. Like the recent psychological thriller Alice, Darling, Palm Trees and Power Lines depicts, chillingly, the potency of emotional coercion, the damage that can be done with words and intimacy alone. “He’s not really using force, and I think that’s with people really identify with,” Dack said of audience responses to the film. “Because in that sense, you can miss it when it’s happening, and then you look back on it differently.”
The film already resonated with people re-evaluating their own past relationships – mostly women, some men. “It’s really crazy how many women have experienced [this]. This is not unique at all,” said Dack. “I hope people can forge a new sense of empathy and understanding and willingness to discuss these sort of things,” said McInerny. I left it wondering, for months since, how Lea would reckon with what happened to her – what beliefs she would shed and correct, what stories she would retell or reshape, what empathy she would extend herself.
Palm Trees and Power Lines is released in cinemas and to rent in the US on 3 March with a UK date to be announced
