Somersault

After making a misjudged advance towards her mother's boyfriend, 16-year-old Heidi (Abbie Cornish) flees her home for the small Australian ski town of Jindabyne. Entranced by the startling beauty of the wintry landscapes and falling snow, she begins to create a new life for herself. With little money or practical experience, she accepts a job at a petrol station and finds lodging with Irene (Lynette Curran). When she falls for Joe (Sam Worthington), the son of a wealthy local farmer, her self-destructive tendencies re-surface, and her fragile new world threatens to come tumbling down. An erotic, lyrical depiction of a young girl’s sexual awakening, SOMERSAULT is a breakthrough debut for both its director and its star and "a superb coming-of-age film." (Variety)

“This remarkable film from Australia, the debut feature of writer-director Cate Shortland, moves to the lyrical rhythms and unhurried pace of a 1970s road movie, or one of those Joni Mitchell ballads about traveling in some vehicle through an unspecified landscape and trying to find a sense of yourself. It’s not a movie you watch so much as one that you feel — a succession of dreamlike fragments from the life of 16-year-old Heidi (Abbie Cornish), who gets caught kissing (and then some) her barmaid mother’s boyfriend and, rather than sticking around for the fallout, makes a run for it. She eventually lands in the Aussie ski town of Jindabyne, where she takes a job as a service-station clerk and embarks on an affair with a local farmer’s son (Sam Worthington), who has some sexual-awakening issues of his own to work out. Those might have been the makings of a standard-issue summer-I-became-a-woman melodrama, were it not for the facts that Somersault takes place in winter and that Shortland seems unable to manufacture anything resembling melodrama or sentimental cliché. The movie gives off the knowing sense of how adolescent lives can slip away from their bearers, and the shifting of tones Shortland achieves, often within the course of a single scene — including a drunken motel-room encounter that transforms into a terrifying near rape — is flabbergasting. She also has a remarkable eye for detail, crafting sensuous images that melt into one another like bends in a tranquil stream. But Somersault is above all a showcase for the talented Cornish, who asserts the role with sexy, know-it-all confidence, then shows us the trembling little girl lurking just beneath. “ (Scott Foundas, L.A. Weekly)