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Somersault
Bad girls. Talking about the sad girls.
2004
Review: May 1, 2006
Director: Cate Shortland
Starring: Abbie Cornish, Sam Worthington, Lynette Curran, Nathaniel Dean
Not needed, though might have been nice.
THE SETUP:
Young girl runs away from home and attempts to survive on her own.
DISCUSSION:
My friend and I decided to go see this based on all the good reviews it was getting, as well as our shared love for sleazy older guys who come on to younger women, which we had been promised this movie is full of. Sleaze and edification: recipe for cinema success! So off we went.
The first thing that happens in that Heidi [Abbie Cornish] comes on to her mother’s [hot, sleazy] boyfriend. They start making out, and the mom comes in [as an open doorway placed threateningly in frame promises], and justifiably freaks out. Then Heidi runs away to Jindabyne, which is apparently this resort town in Australia. She calls this guy she’s met in the past, who hangs up on her. So here she is in this town, with no plan and nowhere to go. She tries to get a job, but the season is on the wane, so no one is hiring. She goes out to bars, and picks guys up in order to have a place to stay, but in the first instance she is told that the guy she just slept with has a girlfriend and, well, bye. The second guy she picks up is Joe, and her relationship with him forms a large portion of the content of the movie.
Joe is just an everyday Aussie roughneck who doesn’t really want a relationship, but finds himself drawn to Heidi again and again. Neither of them has any skill at expressing themselves, and they tend to communicate through impulsive actions and reactions. They get in numerous fights, he just takes off, then shows up again a few days later. In the meantime Heidi, who is just 16 by the way, studies another woman applying lipstick in a bar mirror, and practices love talk in her mirror at home [“Your eyes are so intense… so are yours… I want to kiss you… I want you to kiss me…”]. Cornish gives an excellent, very natural performance that is so straightforward one doesn’t really understand how good it was until later [she won best actress in the Australian awards for her performance]. There are other subtle touches like TV footage of a house being moved [rootlessness, etc.] and a highly subjective camera style that s constantly showing what the characters see.
Midway through, Heidi starts getting passive-aggressive and self-destructive, and this is where the movie started to get on my bad side. At one point Heidi abruptly asks Joe if he loves her, and if he’s her boyfriend. He says “I don’t like being interrogated,” and she then swallows an entire bowl of hot chilies. That is the point at which I would vacate the restaurant and leave her to die, if that’s what she wants to do, and that was the last point the movie or the character had my sympathy. I was under the impression that this is one of those films in which we have an adolescent girl who is a major fuck-up, and we’re supposed to feel so sorry for her because she’s such a major fuck-up [see also: Prozac Nation]. And of course, there’s absolutely no way she could DO anything about what a fuck-up she is, and can take no responsibility for what a fuck-up she is. I knew the movie had completely lost me when I found myself saying: “You know, is there ANYTHING that has happened to her that was not directly HER FAULT?” Then we have this hideous Lilith Fair-esque song—you know, where the singer can’t actually SING, but we’re supposed to hear that as SINCERITY—and the movie was over, with me railing to my friend about how much I hated it.
But, bizarrely, as I thought about it more that night, I realized that I was wrong about it, and began to think it was really very good. It is not sentimental and asking for sympathy as I originally thought, and is really a very touching movie about a naïve girl who brands herself as ‘bad,’ and goes about trying to survive on her own for a while, and how that works out. I’m going to talk about the ending from here on out, but if what you’ve read above sounds interesting to you, go check it out.
SPOILERS > > >
At the end, after things have really reached a low for her, Heidi says to her landlord [the wonderful Lynette Curran] “I did something really bad,” and tells her about kissing her mother’s boyfriend. Curran, whose son is in prison, says “whatever you’ve done, your mother wants to see you,” and suggests they call the mother. The mother comes at the end, and she and Heidi go home together, the end.
It was the simplicity of the ending that kept me thinking about this movie and ultimately changed my mind. It pointed back to the beginning, and made me wonder why we didn’t get any information about Heidi before she came on to her mother’s boyfriend. That’s what gave me my first clue that the movie is not about Heidi’s character and past—it’s not about her being a fuck-up—it’s about the consequences of this one action and how she deals with it. She runs away, and I think she settles into the mind-set that she is a ‘bad girl’ and that there is only so much that can be expected of bad girls. In her immaturity, she tries to get by the talents and qualities she THINKS she has, mainly having to do with sexuality and emotional manipulation, and over the course of the film finds that she’s not quite as savvy and talented in this respect as she thought she was. That’s why Cornish’s performance is so affecting in retrospect, as opposed to while watching it—she’s trying to act confident and adult, and it’s only later that you realize how scared she is and how desperately she’s winging it. This is why I found the scene of her studying the woman applying lipstick in the mirror so memorable.
What I also find moving about the movie is the impression [that also hit me hardest after the movie ended] of Heidi’s deep despair. She believes that she has done something so bad that she has forever lost her mother’s love, and I think she is also grappling with the idea that she herself is rotten at the core, and I think a lot of her self-destructive behavior is in some self-fulfilling way because she feels that that is how ‘bad girls’ behave. If you look at it this way, the movie is about how this girl narrowly escaped being irrevocably caught in this horrible, desperate life, and how lucky she was that the one guy she hooked up with ultimately turned out to be a decent fellow. In this way you can see the title as about her life taking a flip upside-down, then righting itself again.
So, ultimately a good, subtle movie that takes a different, critical tack on the oft-tread ‘teenagers in peril/fucked-up, self-destructive teen girls’ subgenre, featuring good writing and direction and wonderful performances.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
If you're into very well-done dramas about the psychology of teenage girls.
