Somersault is crap

i dunno, i quite liked the movie. i didnt really expect it to be really big, and i suppose it hasnt sold heaps of tickets. it did win i think 13 AFI's. Anyway, i did like it, i thought it was a refreshing way to do it, heaps different from how Hollywood would have interpreted the same story, i am sure. I think it was a great accomplishment for the director's first go (i think it was her first go?) but yeah, definitely not the style of movie to appeal to everyone

I do appreciate that it was artfully done, but I think it was a little overdone. In a film where the character is supposed to be stumbling along effortlessly, it appeared far too laboured. And film critics do pay more attention to form rather than content which is probably why it took away all the AFI awards. I really didnt like the story and the characters were pretty shallow. Sam Worthington always acts exactly the same in all his movies.

I agree. Include a girl sleeping around, a guy kissing a guy as well as a kid with a an odd mental disabilty and you'll get certain sort of people studying cetain things at uni thinking its the greatest thing ever.

Well you've pretty much summed up my feelings for this film so I have nothing to add.

i agree this film was a wank at most. i didn't relate to any of the charters nobody was likeable except the widow hotel onwer irene.
i will give it credit where credit is due though. it was shot well, the music was nice and the location was good. But this script what were they thinkin. i was left baffeled as to what the film maker was trying to say. cause to my mind it seemed like a pointless exercise.
abbie should stick to hiphop at least until she gets a decent script.

Yes I agree. I went along expecting something special and thought it was crap.

Not exactly crap, just a ho-hum film. Flat characters (we don't really care about any of them), and a script where not much of anything happens. If it was meant to be a tale of self-discovery, then make the main character someone who's worth discovering, not this semi-retarded girl with an overactive libido. Sam Worthington is a star in the making, or should be, but you couldn't tell, not from this film, it's just a meandering script that doesn't give anybody much to do. I'd say the film is an interesting failure - it reminds me of a much more accomplished and truly affecting film titled Ruby In Paradise, which was Ashley Judd's first major role, in which she played a young girl in search of herself. That one packed a wallop though, Somersault doesn't. The photography is fine, but the handheld camera gets to be much too annoying at times and destroys the intimacy of certain scenes (probably the opposite of what it was trying to accomplish). I'd give it a 5/10.

Thanks to previous contributors for one of the most interesting threads I've read in IMDB. I'm saddened to be offering yet another negative response to "Somersault" because our Australian industry has become an endangered species with precious few films making a profit. That this mediocre production won a dozen Aust.Film Institute awards demonstrates why even Arthouse Aussie film devotees are voting with their feet against phony dialogue, silly plot turns and excessive employment of grating film school techniques.

Time and again, characters' motivations are implausible or murky at best: Irene allowing a total stranger to live in her son's flat; the incessantly nasty bagging of Joe by his mates; the unfriendly response to Heidi of "servo" co-worker, Bianca; the truncated introduction of Joe's exploratation of homosexuality; the excessively cruel treatment Roy gives Heidi; Bianca's subsequent refusal to let Heidi explain her side of Roy's accusations; the cliche' of loneliness used as the excuse for Heidi inviting two blokes to her flat strictly for sex; the inexplicable final scene between Heidi and Joe followed by the final undeveloped scene between Heidi and her mother.

Doubtless, people who admire this film could offer deep and meaningful refutations of these criticisms, but I found it a terrible waste of a fine cast, especially the always-brilliant Anne-Louise Lambert ("Draughtsman's Contract", "Dirtwater Dynasty", "Breathing Under Water") who was given only a couple of truncated scenes as Joe's mother.



"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." W.B. Yeats