SYNOPSIS: After making a misjudged advance towards her mother's boyfriend, 16-year-old Heidi flees her home for the small Australian ski town of Jindabyne.  Entranced by the startling beauty of the wintry landscapes and falling snow, she begins to create a new life for herself.  With little money or practical experience she accepts a job at a petrol station.  When she falls for Joe, the son of a wealthy local farmer, her self-destructive tendencies re-surface and her fragile new world threatens to come tumbling down.  An erotic lyrical depiction of a young girl's sexual awakening, Somersault is a breakthrough debut for both its director and its star.

EDITORIAL REVIEW:  This is a downbeat film that threatens often to turn into tragedy, as a runaway teenager, with the ironically innocent name of Heidi, looks unsuccessfully for a place in the world and in other people's hearts.  Loneliness, in fact, seems to prevail as characters reach ineffectually toward each other, often coming away empty-handed.

Shot in winter in the mountains of New South Wales, where local ski resorts provide a tourist economy and a flood of young people looking for fun and casual encounters, the film brings Heidi together with a local boy who has troubles enough of his own and is running away from them with hard drinking.  While he eventually rebuffs Heidi's overtures of affection, a new friendship with a convenience store co-worker is soured by the girl's father, and a motel manager whose son is doing time, rents her a room but proves there are limits to her generosity.

Beautifully filmed, with an effort to capture images of ice, cold nights, snow and fog to represent the isolation of its characters, this movie is a harsh story of the heart's hunger for love and acceptance.  As such, it is an adult treatment of that subject and while there is a kind of resolution at the end, the dark undertones of a tragedy averted dominate the final images.  The DVD includes a short making-of featurette.
 

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* This DVD will play in North America only.  This DVD should play in most players outside of North America as well, but it's not guaranteed. This DVD will play in any computer DVD-Rom.  This is NOT a DVD-R.

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STARRING: Abbie Cornish, Damian de Montemas, Olivia Pigeot, Elizabeth Muntar.
AVAILABILITY: In stock! Ships within one business day.
LENGTH: 102 minutes.
LANGUAGE: English, with OPTIONAL SPANISH SUBTITLES.
SPECIAL FEATURES: 1.78:1 (16:9 Widescreen); 5.1 Dolby Digital; 1 disc; making of Somersault; Deleted scenes; Interview with Robert Humphreys - Director of Photography; Uncut.
VIEWER DISCRETION: Nudity, sexual scenes, coarse language, violence.
PICTURE QUALITY: Excellent picture quality. (what's this mean?)
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: Australia (2004).
ALSO KNOWN AS: More Than Scarlet (Australia) (working title).
DATE ADDED TO OUR LIBRARY:  August 22, 2008.
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