The absorbing Australian drama Jindabyne (made by Ray Lawrence, who also created Lantana) showed an interesting flip side of Oz life to non-Australian audiences. The crisp quiet air of south-eastern snow towns like Jindabyne refrigerates the residents of small mountain communities who move about on top of drowned cemetery towns, long submerged under the enormous lakes created by the 1960s damming of the area's Snowy River. It's not exactly Mad Max or "Crocodile Hunter" territory.

The wildly over-praised Somersault sends Abbie Cornish's teen-nymphomaniac Heidi to the brittle atmosphere of Jindabyne after she runs away from home, having been sprung making out with her mother's boyfriend. her making out with her mother's boyfriend. There, she meets Joe (Sam Worthington), a slightly older but just as introspective hunk who might also be gay and Irene, a recently widowed motel owner-manager.

Somersault won a record 13 Australian Film Institute Awards - every single category. It probably deserved Best Music, Cinematography and so on: the film is beautifully shot and the music score is lovely. Much of the acting is impeccable, too. But the movie starts sinking at around the ten minute mark as Heidi's naive-baby-woman-in-search-of-warmth routine starts to chase its tail and the film's dreamy pace and style starts to look like a film-student nightmare. From this point on shockingly bad lines of dialogue start to detonate with increasing regularity and characterisations and storylines appear to be driving without snow chains. Sitting-duck metaphors are mercilessly targeted, with hoary old yokels noting that just like the submerged old towns, life is often not what it appears to be, on the surface, and Heidi swallowing bowls full of red chili peppers.

Pity Heidi didn't choke on them, as she's a dire liability to her own story. Aptly described by Ed Gonzalez of Slant Magazine as a "catatonic tart", Heidi's inner motivations (if she has any) are inscrutable while her actions are unpredictable, unbelievable. Why does she walk into a ski shop and start fondling the neck of the older, male manager? Why does she tongue kiss her mother's boyfriend? Heidi is 16, yet she's apparently been hanging it out for some time already as when she gets to Jindabyne, she pulls out the contact details of tricks she's met in the past in Canberra. The little whore mopes around like Emily Watson's Bess, the simple-minded womble from Breaking The Waves who fucks her way through an entire Scottish coastal town under the impression that she is doing so under the guidance and approval of God. What's Heidi's excuse? Sentimental camera glides over Heidi's scrapbook, red gloves and other kooky objects don't help us establish any empathy with Heidi, as the splintered and separated shades of her character cannot constitute anyone realistic or resonant.

The gay subplot is the highlight of the film. I never thought I'd write that sentence. Free of the slack pretensions that saturate the rest of Somersault, the sequences between Joe and Richard (Erik Thomson), an older guy who recognizes Joe's furtive glances, are concise and suspenseful. Handsome and charismatic Worthington recently scored the lead in James Cameron's first film since Titanic, Avatar. Here, his brooding and blokey maybe-gay provides a much-needed counterweight to Cornish's impersonation of horny flotsam.