Quotes of the Day

Like the dreamy teen of her debut feature Somersault, who makes a scrapbook collage of Mt. Fuji above a forest of girlie-magazine nudes, Cate Shortland has an eye for kooky detail. At her local café in Sydney's Bondi, a bowl of green marinated pears first captures her imagination, then a seaplane that seems to skim the nearby headland. "It's so low - it's amazing," the 36-year-old says with girlish wonder. "Must be going to land on the harbor." Then the firm hand of the director takes over. "I was wondering if we should move to the place next door," she suggests. "It's much quieter."

At the end of a recent media screening of Somersault, which opens in Australia on Sept. 16 ahead of a worldwide release, you could have heard a pin drop. In Shortland's beautifully atmospheric coming- of-age drama set in the New South Wales snowfields town of Jindabyne, emotions fluctuate as wildly as teenage hormones, but for audiences the most consistent is astonishment. Hushed tones have followed Somersault since it was invited to screen in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in May. "It was thrilling, yeah, it was cool," Tom Schutzinger, of Sydney band Decoder Ring, who composed the film's haunting score (see side bar), says of Somersault's premiere at the film festival.

So is the movie. It follows teenage runaway Heidi (Abbie Cornish), caught in bed with her mother's boyfriend, to Jindabyne, where she befriends a lonely hotel owner (Lynette Curran), finds a job at a petrol station, and falls in love with Joe (Sam Worthington), the son of well-to-do farmers. But there's a lot more to the film than its plot. Shortland, who studied fine arts at Sydney University before going on to graduate from the Australian Film Television and Radio School, gives an impression of teenage life as textured and poetic as Heidi's scrapbook. Stones thrown into a lake cut to the sound of snooker balls. Heidi watches her stern new lover throw water across his ute's icy windscreen and her heart melts. Rejected by Joe, she goes to an alpine club and watches revelers in an indoor pool tumble as if in sexual free fall.

It's a film of looking and seeing, of substance and feeling. In a pivotal scene, the sleazy father of her service-station friend Bianca (Hollie Andrew) drives Heidi to Lake Jindabyne at night and points out how the original town was flooded by the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme: "All that sitting out there," he says, "under the surface." Think of the film as a snow dome, its characters trapped under the glass of their emotion. There's Bianca's young brother, unable to empathize with others because of Asperger's syndrome. At the Siesta Inn, where Heidi takes refuge, the plucky proprietor harbors a deep shame. And there's Joe, whose intractable charm belies an existential crisis hinted at in his flirtations with an older gay landowner. When the dome breaks, things get messy.

Most messed-up of all is Heidi, Shortland's angel with dirty wings, whose eternal openness almost leads to her destruction. In the film's most daring scene, she brings home two city boys to her room where, drugged out, she is passed around like a rag doll. Both funny and unbearably sad, the scene developed from intensive rehearsals with National Institute of Dramatic Art graduates Toby Schmitz and Henry Nixon. "It was almost as if it was just her body in the scene and not her soul," Shortland recalls. With Cornish's out-there performance (the light to Worthington's dark), something beautiful is released.

The acting newcomer brings to Heidi a slow sensuality. She's disarmingly innocent, with the cheekbones of a young Nicole Kidman. But it's her upward-inflecting voice that perfectly captures adolescence, the state of self-discovery first mined by Shortland in Joy (2000), her graduating aftrs short. "You know what it is?" she muses. "I was reading about Gus Van Sant. He was saying that it's a time of life where you're open to the most change, and that makes for fascinating characters."

Without the New South Wales Film and Television Office's Aurora Script Workshop, from which Somersault is the first feature to be made, these characters might have turned out differently. Shortland had originally envisaged a Scarlett O'Hara femme fatale hooking up with a working-class road worker who lives on the shores of Lake George. Then Aurora introduced her to Oscar-nominated screenwriter Rob Festinger (In the Bedroom) and The Piano producer Jan Chapman. "They just said, Throw out the script and start again," Shortland recalls.

What they didn't get rid of is a truthfulness that comes from characters drawn from life. Heidi was an art-school tomboy type Shortland had observed while working in a jeans shop in Canberra, where she grew up, while Bianca's Asperger's brother, in whom Heidi sees a mirror image of herself, is an amalgam of the children the director worked with as a teaching aide at a special school in Sydney. "There's something beautiful about their fixation with detail," Shortland recalls. The same could be said of her own painterly eye. And her extraordinary ability to stir empathy for the souls in her celluloid snow dome.

• Michael Fitzgerald
• Taking the lid off teen life, Cate Shortland reveals the poetry beneath the angst