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Jamie Dack’s Palm Trees and Power Lines is about the loss of someone. In the end, 17-year-old heroine Lea (played by the amazing Lily McInerny) seems lost within herself, unsure of who she is meant to be. It’s the summer before her senior year. The trouble begins with a chance encounter with an older man, Tom (Jonathan Tucker), who is twice Lea’s age but still shows interest. That’s the only way it starts. Palm Trees is a film about a young woman who is unsuspectingly introduced to sex work by a charming 34-year-old man. He starts off on the right foot, as a knight in shining armor during a meaningless bruise at a restaurant, digging into her affections with practiced patience. This is a film that operates on the principle that the most routine form of this violence is subtle, not sensational. He doesn’t “seem” to be the guy who does business with women, because he’s the dreamy guy with the pickup truck, the biceps, the masculine calm that instills authority without aggression. That’s the danger.
But only a part. Palm Trees is the kind of movie where young women like Lea and her best friend Katie tend to be cool enough, disenchanted enough for the guys who don’t really care about them – who would flee at first sight the complication – wanting to keep her close. And where sex has that familiar, vague sense of currency: having sex is better than not, more mature than not, though no one can say exactly why. The film isn’t a sociological study, but Dack has an analytical sense of why these young people are giving up. That’s what we initially spend a good portion of the film watching them do. Lea and Katie sunbathe and wonder if anyone is looking at them. Lea watches makeup tutorials on her phone, which makes her mother (played by Gretchen Mol) feel pathetic for being so needy and in love, while she, Lea, who is just as needy, proud of being less desperate to act. The two, Lea and Katie, intervene when the boys are talking about the size of another girl’s boobs. This is all familiar material; it’s “being one of the boys,” it’s seeing your parents and realizing—with desperation—that they could be your future.
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It changes when Tom arrives. That’s nurturing, the film makes clear, not seduction: Dack makes sure it doesn’t feel comfortable for the audience, makes sure we understand that Tom is playing a long game without the film ever resorting to how to feel one. Palm Trees works because its leads, McInerny and Tucker, understand that only one of those characters knows what’s happening. And so we get a Leah who knows this is wrong – she hides it; She only tells Katie enough details to seem cool because she’s dating someone unknown to her peers – yet has an open crush, allows herself to feel, which Tom struggles to make her feel to give him, her life, her friends. We can see Tucker’s suppleness and know to guard against that. And we can see why Lea gets dragged into it anyway.
Palm Trees is more than a little reminiscent of other effective forays into the dangers and disillusionment of women’s late teens. Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank comes to mind for its central mother and daughter, who, like Lea and her mother, are at odds with the daughters wanting more and better for themselves than their mothers seem to have gotten. Eliza Hittman’s films also come to mind because they portray a world that subtly punishes young women for even having a sexuality. Dack isn’t a subtly stylish realist like Arnold, and her approach has less of Hittman’s sensual curiosity. But the world of palm trees is designed with care. The whole thing has a bleached, uniform cool that befits the teenage boredom that flows from day to day. The images lack a warmth that only convinces us even more that Lea hungers to feel them. And there’s an emphasis on Leah taking in the world, evaluating it, evaluating herself. Anything that strikes Tom as suspicious to us, the knowledgeable audience, only makes him intriguing to them. The film is methodical: it shows us a predator at work, the gradual steps, the slowly tumbling inches, luring Lea into his trust. But even the word “bait” feels too loud for Dack’s approach here. The point isn’t to give a neat lesson on how a groomer works, but rather to bond us so completely with the film’s heroine that we fully understand her weak points. We see her and we see what Tom sees in her and plans to exploit.
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Lily McInerney as Leah in Palm Trees and Power Lines. momentum images
Dack wisely avoids the latent sensationalism of this story, courting neither heightened moral gloom nor that variety of punitively explicit sex that goes out of its way to defeat women like Lea to make dubious points about their susceptibility to defeat. In fact, Lea’s scenes alone with men are among the most stylistically reserved in the entire film, especially when it comes to sex. There are no fireworks, none of the manic terror of open violence. It’s so much more depressingly mundane than all of that. Squeezed into the backseat of a guy’s car, dumped into a dingy motel room, there’s nothing here but joylessness for Lea, but the kind of joylessness you don’t have a name for at 17 , the kind that, as the girl’s mother is meant to remind us, only becomes visible to us after it has already changed our entire outlook on life. This sex is not about pleasure and certainly not about love. It’s the kind of sex where we focus on a character’s face, watch her bring herself to a satisfaction she doesn’t really feel, see her face flicker between questions and feelings. It’s a face asking if it’s all worth it. And McInerny serves the idea by flooding the screen with conflicting emotions.
Long before Palm Trees becomes a proper sex work film, it establishes itself as a film about the horrifying social transaction that sex can be – an ancient tale, tragic every time and effective here. Once, during an argument between Lea and Katie, one woman accuses the other of hanging out with guys who all know they have a chance to fuck her. Therefore, the point is implied, keep them to yourself. Palm Trees does not equate these boys, who are Leah’s age, with the older men in this story. It’s also not keen on landing on obvious ideas about badness and blame. It ends up somewhere else – with the question, the problem of being lost. This, the film shows us, is what nursing does. It’s not about who these men are. It’s who they convince us that we need them.