Palm Trees and Power Lines (2023) on Netflix
Summer is ending for Lea, 17, who lives in Southern California with an emotionally absent mother. A man twice her age, Tom, offers the attention she is not getting.
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- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb6.5/103,846 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes89%
Trailer
Plot summary
In suburban Southern California, Lea, 17, passes the last weeks of summer with her best friend Amber and with Jared, a boy her own age whose hookups leave her unsatisfied. Her mother, Sandra, is emotionally absent, and her father lives in Arizona with a new family. One night at a diner Lea catches the eye of an older man, who winks at her as he leaves. Her friends dash out without paying the bill, and when a cook stops Lea, the same man steps in so she can get away. He drives his truck alongside her, coaxes her inside and introduces himself as Tom, 34, adding his number to her phone. Charmed, Lea tells Amber only that she has met someone. Tom says he runs a small business doing home repairs and listens to her troubles at home.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Palm Trees and Power Lines (2023)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Writer-director Jamie Dack said a personal connection to the material and the MeToo movement led her to revisit the story and explore manipulation and consent; she wrote the character as a proxy for her younger self, to explore what had happened to her and what could have happened.
- Dack and co-writer Audrey Findlay built the screenplay to show the stages of grooming in order: targeting a victim, gaining their trust, filling a need, isolating them, and then whatever the abuse ends up being.
- Both Jamie Dack's 2018 short film and the feature grew out of a series of 35-millimeter film photographs that Dack took in her native Southern California.
