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Waif, Waif, Don’t Tell Me

By Louis Bayard
Washington City Paper | May 15, 2006
Sumptuous pictures and undernourished story are likewise the calling cards of Cate Shortland, another Australian writer-director. Her own first feature, Somersault, is as grim on the subject of Eros as Look Both Ways is sweet on Thanatos.

Sixteen-year-old nymphomaiden Heidi (Abbie Cornish) has to flee home after making moves on her mom’s boyfriend. Rudderless and impoverished, she ends up in an Australian ski town—yes, it looks as sad as it sounds—and strikes up a vexed fling with Joe (Sam Worthington), a young member of the local gentry. By night, the two of them find sexual solace in Heidi’s motel room. By day, they find only cross-purposes: Heidi wants to be consumed by love; Joe wants just the opposite. Frustrated by his resistance, Heidi begins to retreat into the very hedonism she’s been trying to escape.

In its essentials, the rich-boy/poor-girl dynamic of Somersault isn’t too different from that of Pretty in Pink—or, come to think of it, of a thousand and one John Hughes movies. But the erotic sequences are considerably more intense, and Shortland already has a fully evolved visual sensibility and a distinctive rhythm. Shots break off just a second or two before you expect them to, and certain images lodge in your mind like scraps of music: the bathysphere view from inside a car as it’s being de-iced, the neon blare of a BP station at night, the menstrual jolt of Heidi’s bright-red gloves against her pallid body.

The story itself wanders in unexpected directions, too, with Joe doing a suspicious amount of horsing around with his best pal and even flirting with a gay neighbor. Mostly, though, Somersault just wanders—the ending is less a wrapping up than a giving up—and its female protagonist can’t bear even the minimal weight that the film exerts on her. Passive, unintelligent, and utterly helpless with men, Heidi commands our attention almost exclusively as a composition (albeit an uncomfortably ravishing one).

Maybe it wasn’t Shortland’s intention to objectify Heidi in the same way all the men around her do. But what exactly was? Though her script pays lip service to “opening up” the heart and the healing powers of true intimacy, neither Heidi nor Joe has grown in any perceptible way by movie’s end—which doesn’t stop the former from announcing, “I think it’s really good that we met.” You can’t blame a girl for putting a positive spin on some bad business, but the problems of these two underdeveloped characters don’t amount to more than a hill of beans—or, for that matter, of Australian snow.
Tags: Cate Shortland, Somersault

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