Young women going to pieces after family troubles, driven to promiscuity or worse, are a common feature of movies and provide a steady stream of prize-winning and career-building roles. Sandrine Bonnaire in Agnès Varda’s Vagabond, for instance, Barbara Loden in her own Wanda, Samantha Morton in Carine Adler’s Under the Skin, Charlize Theron in Patty Jenkins’s Monster. All these movies about degraded females at the end of their tether are directed by women, as is the latest impressive example, Cate Shortland’s feature-length debut Somersault, starring Abbie Cornish. As always the setting – here the interior south-east corner of New South Wales – is as bleak as the heroine’s plight.
Cornish plays 16-year-old Heidi, who’s forced to leave home when found in bed with her blousy mother’s low-life boyfriend. She takes off by bus for what must be the world’s most uninviting ski-resort, where she’s callously dumped after a one-night stand. She tries unsuccessfully to contact a former lover and fails to lure a shopkeeper into a giving her a job. Finally she picks up a rich farmer’s wayward son Joe (Sam Worthington).
From then on she drifts, listlessly, ungratefully, drunkenly, getting a job in a filling station and being given cheap accommodation by the tough, widowed owner of a seedy motel, who’s grieving for her son. Everybody is wounded and sad, which should make Heidi feel at home and for a while she finds comfort in the austere, snow-covered beauty surrounding this forlorn community. But before making a half-hearted recovery, she goes from bad to worse to rock bottom. The performances are uniformly good in an unilluminating way and the film is presumably intended as an antidote to the false bonhomie of life in Neighbours’s Ramsey Street.
Film Review for Somersault
Director Cate Shortland has been shepherding Somersault through the international film festival circuit since May. The haunting Australian drama premiered at Cannes, then screened in Sydney, Melbourne and Edinburgh. Next up are Toronto, Vancouver and Tokyo. Such recognition shows the Bondi filmmaker’s first feature, which stars rising actress Abbie Cornish as a 16-year-old learning some tough lessons about love in a snowfields service town, has struck a chord.
The vulnerable heroine’s confusion between sex and intimacy has moved audiences.The vulnerable heroine’s confusion between sex and intimacy has moved audiences. Viewers have often been just as impressed by the film’s evocative wintry feel and the intense performances of Cornish and Sam Worthington (Gettin’ Square).
For a country that regularly features outback landscapes in its films, Somersault is rare in that it is mostly set in Jindabyne. For a country that has produced a series of often parochial comedies recently, it’s a risky and heartfelt drama.
“It’s been amazing because I’ve met such good people,” Shortland says of the film’s festival life.
“Edinburgh was really good because I got to see some films and met people from all over the world. And went to some good parties.”
The writer-director says she has become less anxious as the film is seen by more people.
“When I went to Cannes, I still was really attached to the film,” she says. “It really felt like a part of me. Whereas now I can watch it and appreciate the audience a bit more; I’m not just freaking out about the film.”
Shortland says that wherever Somersault has screened the audience has responded to the two central characters, Heidi (Cornish) and Joe (Worthington), and asked questions about their lives after the film.
“They were really intrigued about that relationship and those two people,” she says. “Also, people have really responded to the whole look of the film – that it was shot in the Snowy Mountains. They didn’t know that Australia had [that type of] country.”
The real test will come when Somersault hits Australian cinemas on Thursday. Shortland hopes the buzz has not created the expectation that it will save the struggling domestic film industry. “We just wanted to make a beautiful film that affected people,” she says. “You just want people to see something different and think about it and for it to have an effect on them.”
It has taken Shortland eight years to get Somersault to the screen between making shorts and episodes of The Secret Life of Us, Bad Cop, Bad Cop and MDA for television.
The script was often tucked way in a drawer for extended periods before it burst back to life thanks to the intensive Aurora script development workshop. The program provided mentoring from screenwriters Rob Festinger (In the Bedroom) and Alison Tilson (Japanese Story) and later writer-directors Jane Campion (The Piano) and Chris Noonan (Babe).
Somersault’s subject matter is close to Shortland’s heart.
“To be completely honest with another person – to let them see your vulnerabilities, to let them see what you’re scared of, to let them see your dreams – is really hard,” she says. “Because people now just go to pubs and drink and then go home and have sex, they don’t really know each other.
“I’m not making a value judgement on that, because that can be great and it’s a part of growing up. But it can also be really damaging.”
Shortland wanted to shoot the sex scenes in the film so that viewers empathised with Heidi rather than have them become 9 1/2 Weeks-style titillation.
“When Heidi is on the screen you want the audience to be incredibly intimate with her and feel everything she’s feeling,” she says.
“It’s almost like the film, when she’s on the screen, is from her perspective. That’s why the sex scenes are quite raw.”
Shortland says Worthington tried harder than anybody to land the role of Joe, then worked with a voice coach and a choreographer to nail the character of a rich landowner’s son.
The actor says he was useless in the first audition, but went for a drink with Shortland and fell in love with her ideas for the film.
“I trusted Cate knew what she was doing and I trusted Abbie was strong enough to hold this movie,” he says. “And she’s a beautiful girl. It’s not that hard to fall in love with her.”
When he saw Somersault for the first time, Worthington thought it was both a poetic piece of storytelling and a rich visual experience. As for Cornish?
“I didn’t get to see a lot of Abbie’s stuff until it was first put together,” he says. “There’s a performance there that just blows you away.”
Somersault (2005)
Directed by: Cate Shortland
Starring: Abbie Cornish, Sam Worthington, Lynette Curran, Erik Thomson, Hollie Andrew, Leah Purcell, Olivia Pigeot, Blake Pittman, Anne-Louise Lambert, Joshua Phillips
Screenplay by: Cate Shortland
Production Design by: Melinda Doring
Cinematography by: Robert Humphreys
Film Editing by: Scott Gray
Costume Design by: Emily Seresin
Set Decoration by: Glen W. Johnson
Art Direction by: Janie Parker
Music by: Decoder Ring
Studio: Magnolia Pictures
Release Date: October 28, 2005
Visits: 114
