Somersault

Heidi (Abbie Cornish) is a teenage runaway in Somersault.

Herald rating: * * *

The debut feature of a well-regarded maker of short films, Somersault won 13 of the AFI awards - the Australian Oscars - and Cate Shortland is being hailed as the great redeemer of Australian cinema. That may be a minority opinion - I didn't buy it, even on two viewings.

Visually, it's a striking piece of work and a film set in a cold Australia is certainly something new. But the story is vague and full of loose ends. And the characters are wan and uninteresting, in particular the main one. By the time I'd spent the thick end of two hours in her company I was dying for her to hop in that car and take off.

Her name is Heidi (Cornish), and she runs away from home in distress after being caught clumsily coming on to her mum's boyfriend. She fetches up in the snow-town of Jindabyne - an instant 60s town on the shores of a hydro lake.

She calls a man with whom she once had a fling, but is rebuffed. So she picks up a young loser who abandons her in the morning. "He's got a girlfriend," his mates explain.

For 16-year-old Heidi, sex is plainly a commodity rather than an activity. The film invites us to interpret that as some kind of dysfunction, a sort of spiritual self-abnegation prompted by the clash with her mum. But if the first phone call she made in Jindabyne wasn't intended to suggest she'd been promiscuous for a while, why was it included? It's typical of the confused motives that criss-cross a frustrating and very messy movie.

The publicity material notes that Shortland spent seven years on the script. Maybe the first draft was better, but I'm inclined to wonder if Cornish's entirely opaque one-note performance hasn't attracted praise in direct proportion to her Kidmanesque beauty.

Things pick up a bit when Heidi meets Joe (Worthington is terrific, smart and accessible and the likely next big star out of Australia), the son of a farming aristocracy.

As their relationship develops they illuminate each other's vulnerabilities. But many of the film's devices are extraordinarily heavy-handed. Heidi's workmate (Andrew) has a brother with a form of autism and as she explains that he can't interpret emotions, it's almost as if a speech bubble appears in the corner of the screen saying "Hint: Heidi can't either".

Likewise, an otherwise irrelevant subplot about a gay man (Thomson, a New Zealander), selling up and moving on is laboriously wedged into place only so Joe can try to kiss him and he can say: "You don't know what you want." (Cue speech bubble: "Hint: He's got a point there.")

Some of the dialogue fairly clunks. It's painfully plain that a scene in which two men Get Drunk and Share Their Emotions was written by a woman and Heidi's "If you ignore someone and don't call them, you can really hurt their feelings" brought me to the edge of tears - but not the tears the writer had in mind.

For all that, the film looks beautiful, although the visuals often exist for their own sake - for instance, a sequence involving pink glass seems to have been made up on the day - and that visual flair lends it a distinctly European sensibility.

But as I watched it I was reminded of a truly great Australian film, Gillian Armstrong's High Tide, starring Judy Davis, an emotionally coherent woman's story with a central performance of radiant intelligence. Beside it, Somersault looks very minor league.


CAST: Abbie Cornish, Sam Worthington, Lynette Curran, Hollie Andrew, Erik Thomson
DIRECTOR: Cate Shortland
RUNNING TIME: 106 minutes
RATING: R16, sex scenes
SCREENING: Rialto from Thursday