After being caught making out with her mum’s boyfriend, 16-year-old Heidi (Abbie Cornish) boards a bus, leaving Canberra for the ski town of Jindabyne in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales.

Heidi doesn’t want to be alone, but is unable to sustain the attention of a local who had given her his card, a ski bum she hooks up with in a club and who leaves her to go to Sydney with his girlfriend, or the manager of an apparel store she flirts with in hopes of landing a job.

When she’s approached by a good-looking stranger named Joe (Sam Worthington) Heidi refuses to let him leave her, stopping his truck and going with him to a motel. Joe leaves her in the morning to return to the family farm, where he lives and works and has no idea of what he wants from the future.

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Heidi befriends the owner of the motel (Lynette Curran), who allows her stay in the flat formerly occupied by her incarcerated son, and gets a job at a BP petrol station. Joe enters the store one night and eventually realizes the same thing she does; their feelings resonate more deeply with each other than with anyone else in their life at the moment.

Written and directed by Cate Shortland, Somersault swept the Australian Film Institute awards in 2004 and got a limited release in the U.S. in March. I hadn’t heard a peep about it, had zero expectations and ended up really, really liking the film.

Shortland demonstrates terrific sophistication by balancing her debut feature on a narrow wire. She doesn’t let the film veer into TV territory, where everything is explained away, life’s harder edges are softened, and a hug in the closing reel solves everything. At the same time, she doesn’t make a Girls Gone Wild video for the art house (paging Larry Clark) either. Sex or teenage promiscuity have very little to do with the film.

The movie is about intimacy and how we deal with it. Heidi is an alienated kid looking for companionship, but is shown to be more complex than a “teen in trouble.” Shortland gives Heidi a kind heart and great imagination, and with cinematographer Robert Humphreys, expresses this in a sensual visual palette, alternating red and blues throughout, blurring shots and employing slow motion to good effect.

Jindabyne has a faerie tale look – this is the first time I’ve seen snow in an Australian film – but this is also a tourist town, whose innkeepers, farmers and families are barely hanging on. The same thing is going on inside each of the characters. With a story that deals with leaving your troubled past behind for the lure of the road and the promise of a new life, Somersault reminded me a lot of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

Abbie Cornish has drawn a few comparisons to a young Nicole Kidman, but I thought she showed a fearlessness and volatility in her role that recalled some of Naomi Watts’ work. She’s a great find and I’m really interested to see what she and Shortland do next. This one is highly recommended for fans of Australian or indie film.