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Clichés and platitudes, with a little Lolita factor thrown in By: PETER KEOUGH5/10/2006 6:08:28 PM 
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Somersault
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Teenage girls are ripe for exploitation, especially by films that decry exploitation. Sixteen-year-old Heidi (Abbie Cornish, a double for a young Nicole Kidman) wavers between childish wonder and sexual fascination. Stroking a tattoo on the chest of her mom’s boyfriend, she lets the latter impulse get the better of her and then flees the resulting chaos for a snowy Australian resort town. Penniless, homeless, and alone, she falls back on her seductiveness with numbingly predictable, sordid results. Until she bumps into Joe (Sam Worthington), the directionless son of a wealthy local farmer. She wants love and security and is willing to go to extremes to get it. He doesn’t know what he wants — no surprise, since writer/director Cate Shortland has sketched him as a generic foil to Heidi’s kittenish self-destructiveness. Alternating snowflakes and unicorns with drunken sex heightens the Lolita factor but doesn’t add any insight to Somersault’s clichés and platitudes.
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| Having no vested interest in protecting the 'Australian film industry', Mr Keough gets this quite ordinary movie pretty much right. Believe it or not, it was feted as a seriously good movie when it first came out in Australia a while back. Ms Cornish has since moved on to bigger, if not necessarily better, things.
POSTED BY Stephen Saunders AT 05/18/06 10:00 AM |
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