Without the hype and big financial backing movies such at this one often go unnoticed. I didn't know what to expect when I began watching this movie, but it wasn't long before I was drawn into it and the movie did something I look for movies to do for me - it made me feel. We see a young girl named Heidi who begins by doing a foolish thing, kissing her mother's boyfriend and it goes a little too far just when her mother walks in on them. We don't know what happens to her mother's boyfriend, but Heidi is pretty much forced to leave her mother's home with barely the clothes on her back. What follows is fairly predictable. It doesn't take a genius to know that the world is a hostile place for someone who is without a place to live, money, friends, family and with her only assets being her youth and good looks. As I watched, my heart went out to her and I wondered would even I have taken advantage of her and her situation being so vulnerable and desirable, or would I have taken her under my wing and tried to help her as the child she really was and needed, though some might argue didn't deserve because of her naiveté and penchant for getting into jams. I imagine many men, especially would be wondering the same thing. I really liked this movie and the acting was first rate and that surprised me given all the actors were total unknowns. If you want to see another movie as good as this one and similar to this, try the French movie called Vagabond.

Long, pointless, pretty shots of cows and clothes pegs fail to compensate for the lack of thematic vision that this film betrays. Abbie Cornish's performance, whether due to poor direction or lack of skill, is truly awful. On the other hand, Sam Worthington shines on screen and does the best he can with an insufficiently developed character.I was looking forward to seeing this film because I'd heard good things about it. It won multiple awards and I'd heard snippets of the lovely Decoder Ring soundtrack over the radio.Somersault is symptomatic of an Australian film industry that's lost its balls. None of the discipline it takes to put together a good screenplay and execute an interesting film can be found here. What a disappointment.

Beyond the aesthetically beautiful nature of this movie lies a story that is compelling in its realistic portrayal of young love and loneliness. The story moves along slowly, but I felt that this only added to the credibility of the plot, as most life situations aren't jam-packed with intense drama. The characters are flawed and complex - the main character Heidi is at once naive and youthful, and grown-up and savvy. The story details are slowly inserted, sometimes just through imagery - leaving the viewer to assume much of the back story - the movie does not feel contrived because you aren't being told every small detail and how the director wants you to judge each character. I would highly recommend this movie to anyone that enjoys artistic camera angles, realistic characters and situations, and doesn't mind slowing down to enjoy a good story.

"Somersault" is a fresh spin on the in-over-their heads teenager movie, particularly the mixed-up city girl confusing the well-meaning country boy sub-genre. It is a sophisticated look at the motivations and resourcefulness of a teen age runaway. In her debut feature, writer/director Cate Shortland poignantly captures a girl's search for love and independence through sex. It isn't often that we see a film about tantalizing jail-bait from the girl's perspective. The town settings from Canberra to Jindabyne in New South Wales are unusual for Australian films we usually get to see in the U.S., providing an unusual meeting place for cold-weather tourists, the poor in their service industry, and farmers in from cattle stations.Abbie Cornish is a marvel in the central role. Looking startlingly like the young Nicole Kidman from her early Australian movies such as "Flirting", she morphs from coltish girl to sexual aggressor, even as it's clear she doesn't understand what she's getting herself into by thinking she can live out her fantasy in following one guy after another who she has met on the road. With the glimpses we get of her tumultuous inner world through a childish diary, "Heidi"s naiveté is palpably painful as Cornish projects her at different times in the film as being the character's actual 16 or pretending to be 20 when she thinks she can use sex as a manipulable tool without realizing what creepy situations can result. The subtlety of her performance extends to how differently she relates to men than women, particularly as she keeps seeking out mother figures. Sam Worthington is heartbreakingly sweet as equally naive, somewhat older "Joe", who clumsily becomes her protector and something more. I wasn't clear, though, about his back story with issues in his past (there's a lot of family secrets all around). The film also comments on bloke culture, including the ambiguous touches of homo-eroticism in male bonding.The scenes between these two marginalized young people are engrossing with their attraction and hesitation, as they clumsily imitate adult behavior that they can't really handle. Bouncing between maturity and immaturity, tenderness and aggression, they have enough trouble expressing and understanding their feelings without adding sex into the mixture.A side story with an autistic child leads to a way too didactic discussion about empathy and emotions, with flash cards no less.The cinematography had a lovely blue haze, but used fuzzy focus too often. I had some difficulty understanding the male dialogue among thick accents and low sound projection in the Time Square Theater, compounded by the restless male audience, up and down, in and out, slamming doors, who seemed mostly attracted to the film by Cornish's nude scenes. This film is a creative contrast to American indie films that tend to see young women on the cusp of adulthood more as victims as they experiment with their sexual power, such as "Blue Car" or "Hard Candy", or in commercial fare as innocents, like "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants", let alone male fantasy objects as in "American Beauty". A spate of recent non-American directors have focused on their impact on males, such as in "The Holy Girl (La Niña santa)", "À Tout de Suite (Right Now)", and "Lila Says (Lila dit ça)", with varying degrees of the success of this film in capturing their girl/woman confusion.