SOMERSAULT

Australia, 2004
Director: Cate Shortland
Stars: Abbie Cornish, Sam Worthington, Lynette Curran, Erik Thomson

Available on DVD - order here

The absorbing Australian drama Jindabyne (made by Ray Lawrence, who also created the excellent Lantana) showed an interesting flip side of Oz life to non-Australian audiences used to the sun-baked cheer of Muriel’s Wedding or Crocodile Dundee. The crisp quiet air of isolated south-eastern snow towns like Jindabyne refrigerates the residents of small, high-altitude mountain communities who live a quiet, isolated world away from the beach or the outback. In this unique ice-cube, people move about on top of accidental necropoleis - the towns that were submerged under the enormous lakes created by the 1960s damming of the area’s Snowy River.

Though set in the snow towns, the wildly over-praised Somersault owes its roots more to the overwrought sunny coasts of TV’s “Home and Away” with aimless yet quirky teen-slut Heidi (Abbie Cornish) fleeing to the brittle atmosphere of Jindabyne after she gets busted, by her mother, for having sex with her mother’s boyfriend. In Jindabyne, she meets pensive souls like Joe (Sam Worthington), a slightly older but just as introspective hunk who might also be gay and Irene, a recently widowed motel owner-manager.



Somersault won a record 13 Australian Film Institute Awards - every single category. It probably deserved Best Music, Cinematography and so on: the film is beautifully shot and the music score is lovely. Much of the acting is impeccable, too. But the movie starts sinking at around the ten minute mark as Heidi’s naive-baby-woman-in-search-of-warmth routine starts to chase its tail and the film’s dreamy pace and style starts to look like a film-student nightmare. From this point on, shockingly bad lines of dialogue detonate with increasing regularity and characterisations and storylines appear to be skidding downhill without snow chains.

Sitting-duck metaphors are relentlessly massacred, with hoary old yokels noting that just like the submerged old towns, life is often not what it appears to be, on the surface, you know, and Heidi insolently swallowing bowls full of fiery miniature red chili peppers to demonstrate her crazy rebellious streak.

Aptly described by Ed Gonzalez of Slant Magazine as a “catatonic tart”, Heidi wanders into a ski shop and starts fondling the neck of the older, male manager just a day or two after she decided to tongue kiss her mother’s boyfriend. Heidi is 16, yet she’s apparently been hanging it out for some time already as when she gets to Jindabyne, she starts looking up tricks she’s met in the past in Canberra.

The dopey little whore mopes around like Emily Watson’s Bess, the simple-minded womble from Breaking The Waves who fucked her way through an entire Scottish coastal town under the impression that she was doing so under the guidance and approval of God. What’s Heidi’s excuse? Sentimental camera-glides over Heidi’s scrapbook, red gloves and other kooky objects don’t help us establish any empathy with Heidi, as the splintered and obtuse shades of her unlikeable character don’t constitute anyone realistic or resonant.

The gay subplot is the highlight of the film. I never thought I’d write that sentence. Free of the slack pretensions that saturate the rest of Somersault, the sequences between Joe and Richard (Erik Thomson), an older guy who recognizes Joe’s furtive glances, are concise and suspenseful and climax with an ambiguous kiss.

Handsome and charismatic Worthington recently scored the lead in James Cameron’s first film since Titanic, Avatar. Here, his brooding and blokey maybe-gay provides a much-needed counterweight to Cornish’s impersonation of horny flotsam.

For those who want to gaze at Sam Worthington shirtless and nude - people such as myself - here are some applicable screencaps from the woeful Somersault.