Sometimes if you don’t buy what a character does during the first five minutes of a film, it’s impossible to swallow anything else they might do that falls just outside the realm of common sense, like standing naked in the snow while your hunky boyfriend drives off in a rage. Somersault’s 16-year-old protagonist, Heidi (Abbie Cornish), runs away from home after getting caught kissing her mother’s boyfriend (Damian De Montemas). Why the girl decides to make out with the tattooed lug while her mother (Olivia Pigeot) is in the house not only strains for logic, but it’s beyond the film’s own limited introspection; it’s simply an excuse to get the catatonic young woman out of the house in order to subject her to more horrors.
Throughout Somersault, you may find yourself struggling to ascertain why Heidi does the things that she does to herself and the people around her. When Joe (Sam Worthington), a farmer’s son who she meets at a bar, asks her why she was trying to bone two guys at the same time, she explains, “I didn’t want to be alone.” That’s sweet and all, except that you’re liable to agree with Joe when he says something about Heidi being screwed up in the head—a condition that writer-director Cate Shortland isn’t exactly willing to seriously diagnose.
An exercise in film-school pretense, Somersault prettifies the ugliness of a girl’s sexual experience after she leaves her mother’s nest. Australian critics drooled over Robert Humphreys’s lush cinematography, which color-codes Heidi’s experience in such a way as to suggest that the whole film was shot using filters melted down from diaries and music boxes. Thrown out of the house, the girl feels blue, and when she visits a garbage dump, she actually gets to look through—get this—a pair of rose-tainted glasses, because, you know, Heidi keeps a stiff upper lip in spite of not having a steady job or place to sleep.
Christine Jeffs’s Rain similarly indulged in these sorts of metaphoric visual affections, and though both Jeffs and Shortland seem equally obsessed with the sensation of violence and sexual danger that underlie fairy tales, Shortland scarcely grapples with these implications; the beautification of her female lead’s bourgeoning sexual identity seems to exist for her benefit only (Heidi is just along for the ride), where Rain’s aesthetic put-ons seem to actually reflect the boredoms and illusions of the main character played by Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki. But to Shortland’s credit, she directs actors well, and even if a gay subplot involving Joe and the man, Richard (Erik Thomson), who he works for seems to come out of the blue (or pink, or purple, as it’s impossible to remember the dominant mood-enhancing color scheme of any given shot), she has an eye and ear for the boredom of small-town living.
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