Picnic at Hanging Rock

See Peter Weir's masterpiece or read the book! They're magical, haunting and classic. This on the other hand, isn't. Did filmmakers really forget how to make that dreamy look? It looks too crisp and clean for a dreamy, surreal tale of mystery...just sayin'. I love Dormer but I don't think she fit the character. I loved the costumes!

It's the turn of the century Australia. Mrs Hester Appleyard (Natalie Dormer) purchases a remote mansion turning it into a girls' school. Miranda Reid (Lily Sullivan) is a self-possessed student expected to learn refinement. She stabs a handsy soldier with a pitchfork. It's St. Valentine's Day 1900. The girls are off to picnic at Hanging Rock. As most nap, Miranda leads Irma Leopold, Marion Quade, and Edith Horton up the Rock. The girls and their teacher Miss McCraw go missing. Only Edith returns in a shocked state.

The 1975 film was a critical hit and is a real sign post in Australian cinema. It's a psycho-sexual drama in hormonal madness. The lack of a revelation only added to its unique dreamlike quality. This TV series does have some of that. The teen sexual drama is in full bloom. Dormer, Sullivan, and the girls are all great. The revelation is little Inez Currõ who delivers a dark innocent performance and fully owns her episode as the protagonist. One of the reasons why the film's confused nature works is that it made it into a dream. The TV series tries to have it both ways by diving into the characters' individual stories while keeping some of the dreamlike qualities. It doesn't work as well and revealing an ending may be its major flaw. It's confused without the enjoyment of the dream. It's analyzing the dream without making sense of it. This material may not be able to translate into something longer than a movie.

It's unlikely that approximately six hours of TV are required to make a spin-off from a source-novel of less-than two-hundred pages. 'Picnic at Hanging Rock', like Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness', draws power from what's left unsaid. Whereas Joan Lindsay, in the original book, has the imagination to step-inside an earlier time-period, this adaptation simply superimposes twenty-first century mores onto a world where they don't belong. Nearly everyone has become 'pan-sexual'; and it's highly unlikely that a young aboriginal woman would have attended a posh girls' school in Australia c.1900 (no matter how politically correct this might be). The episodes are often terribly over-directed. Natalie Dormer seemed miscast as 'Mrs Appleyard'. 'Miranda', 'Irma' and 'Marion' are played by exquisitely beautiful actresses, but the characters come across as annoying and shallow. Lola Bessis really shines in an expanded characterization of 'Mademoiselle'.

In the 1967 book, the missing girls are kept in the background, becoming more-of an idea or enigmatic symbol. A large part of the novel consists of the author - a woman - writing about women being viewed by men (Michael, a young, upper-class Englishman, and his working-class Aussie friend, Albert). Bringing the senior-boarders right into the foreground distorts the story, producing diminishing returns. And 'Mrs Appleyard' has been disastrously rewritten. More is definitely less in this case.

Some excellent acting, fabulous camera work, great set scenes that capture the claustrophobic atmosphere of the school. The things that let this don't, we just don't like anybody and really don't care. The graphics and music jar with the action and prove to be a distraction often played on instruments not in keeping with the period. The settings are too crisp and too clean and the director is fixated with symmetry, this effect creates a feeling of style over substance. The inner emotional conflicts of the characters rarely surface and so we the viewer are detached. Overall I enjoyed it but was just not memorable.

...not because the series was bad, although what I did see was incredibly bad, but because I could not get past the 1990's New Age soundtrack. Not only did it sound more like dinner music played in an desperately upscale restaurant, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the story and was intrusive enough to take me right out of the show and start wondering what Kitaro is doing these days.