Word: somersault
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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 caf? 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...
...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...
...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...
Matt FitzGerald, Tom Schutzinger and Pete Kelly of Decoder Ring are trying to decipher the lyrics sung by guest artist Lenka on the title track to their score for Somersault. It's a floaty ballad in which the film's ethereal Heidi imagines seeing a vision of her lover in snow clouds above the Australian Alps. As they do for the rest of the movie, Decoder Ring provide a soundscape of dark valleys and sunny alpine flourishes, from the deep chime of the glockenspiel to high-pealing piano and xylophone. But how exactly do Lenka's lyrics...
...moods they scope on guitar (Kelly), keyboards (FitzGerald) and percussion (Schutzinger) defy description. But over the course of three years, one album and legions of live shows, the Sydney band has created countless sounds tracks in search of a movie. Then last year, while watching the rushes of Somersault in Jindabyne, director Shortland was handed their CD by music supervisor Norman Parkhill, and the sound chimed with her vision. "Do you know that Icelandic band Mumm?" Shortland says. "We were listening to them as well, and Bj?rk, and Goldfrapp, so there's a lot of sampling of that Austrian mountain...