You see, in Australia, everything is backwards. Our winter is their summer. Our vermin is their dinner. Our dull, navel-gazing
coming-of-age stories are their best films of the year, worthy of sweeping the Australian Film Institute awards. How a down-to-earth country like Australia grew so attached to the pretentious "Somersault," I have no idea. The feature debut of writer/director
Cate Shortland, it is the story of a trampy 16-year-old girl named Heidi (
Abbie Cornish) who runs away from home after her trampy mother catches her kissing her -- that is to say, Mom's -- boyfriend. What happens when Heidi runs away? Why, a personal journey of discovery, of course! Believing she can get a job working for a man she once slept with (it is implied), she goes to a rural ski-resort town currently in the off-season. It's a tiny village where everyone knows everyone else, and where her first instinct is to make money by prostituting herself. When that fails, she takes a job as a cashier in a convenience store, working alongside a girl her age named Bianca (Hollie Andrew), who takes a fast disliking to her.
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