Pique-nique à Hanging Rock

I first saw PAHR while in high school, and it was the beginning of a long and drawn-out love affair with the film. The look, feel and sound of it drew me in at once, and the open-endedness of it appealed to my romantic teenage notions, striking me as being terribly, terribly profound. I searched out the book, and the sequel (both out of print in the US) and had a good long obsession over the film.

Years later, I still appreciate it deeply, but I realize now that if I were to see it for the first time today, I might not be quite so entranced. Yes, it is moody and beautiful, full of deliciously gossamar images, beautiful actresses, a haunting soundtrack, and a hypnotically slow and deliberate pace... but I can now see that it is a very youthful effort on Wier's part. It is decidedly a young director's film, firmly mired in the style of its era (the 70s). The heavy-handedness of the direction is evident in many ways, mostly in the repeated metaphors of Miranda as a swan, an angel, etc.... It has anachronistic costumes, makeup and hair, although the sets design is attractive and accurate enough.

However, let it be noted that the film is far more about symbolism and atmosphere than anything else, and on that front, it succeeds admirably. Among the highlights:

The repressed Victorian schoolgirls, whose burgeoning sexual longings are channeled into torrid, purple verse and close romantic friendships

The famous corset-lacing scenelet

The implied relationship between Mrs. Appleyard and the "masculine" Miss McCraw

The disappearance of only the "pure": Miranda (love), Marion (science), Miss McCraw (math), and the rock's rejecting Edith (gluttony), Irma (worldliness), and all men.

One might go on about the sexual imagery of the rock itself, with its monoliths and chasms, but I will refrain. Because after you've seen the movie, you realize how many times these things have been hammered into your head.

I still love this film dearly, despite the obviousness of it all. I wish that a soundtrack were available, as the original music is lovely. If you know a teenager, or are one, this is the movie for you. May your love affair with it go on as long as mine.

Confession: I don't know WHAT I think of this movie! Not only that, I had to go to IMDb's user comments to find a person or persons to TELL ME what I think of this movie. None did. I read all 45 of the user comments (reviews) and I STILL don't know what I think of this movie. That's how enigmatic this movie is. To me, anyway.

I did learn one thing, however, from reading these 45 preceding user reviews. A very great many of these user-reviewers are some of the keenest and most astute moviegoers whom I've ever encountered. They know things about this movie and have picked up things from it which are completely over my non-perceptive head.

Example: One user-reviewer, an English gentleman, I believe, obviously did his doctoral thesis on this movie. He knows things about it that even Peter Weir (the director) doesn't know. A number of others did their masters on it. Many of the latter refer to Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert), one of the girls who disappeared, in terms of her being a sort of virginal Botticelli-like angel. While I do agree that Miranda is a most ethereal character, whenever she would appear in a scene, "Botticelli" was not the first word to jump into my mind. But that's just me.

Much is made by many of these perceptive and sharp user-reviewers of the girls' awakening feelings of sexuality and of the phallic symbolism of Hanging Rock to the girl climbers. Oh. I was just wondering: Where'd the girls go? What happened to them?

One of the many puzzling aspects to the story of this movie, one on which no one seems to agree, is.....is it true? At first I thought it was. Then I thought it wasn't. Now, I have no idea! And the user-reviewers are of no help on this, politely at odds amongst themselves on the story's veracity. I'd like to believe that the movie and novel which preceded it are based on a true incident. No, not because I would wish anything bad to have happened to these adventurous, yet innocent, young girls some 101 years ago. I wish it were true only because it would be but one more "event" to add to the great mystery that we know as life. A mystery, a question, to which no one has the answer.

Listen to me! I sound like I know what I'm talking about. Which I don't! Especially about this movie. In the final analysis, this movie left me generally unfulfilled. There is much in it that is worthy of praise, first and foremost the moviemaking skills of Peter Weir. But when credits rolled, something was missing. I felt as if I'd just eaten a delicious Thanksgiving dinner, having enjoyed every single bite, then, upon arising from the table, felt my stomach completely empty. A feeling stranger than strange.

Anyone viewing this film for the first time must be prepared for a movie in which all the various and loose plot ends do NOT get all tied up by the film's denouement. If one is so prepared, one may come away from it more fulfilled than was I. "Tastes great," unfortunately, was as far as I could get with it.

One sad note: At the movie's conclusion, Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts) arrived at a fate not much unlike one arrived at by Ms. Roberts herself just five short years after the movie's release. Just as art often imitates life, so, too, in this case, did life imitate art.

This is mesmerizing film with a cipher at its center. Less is more. I am amused at some of the comments. There seem to be two types: those which depict the movie as "beautiful, ethereal and subtle" and those which depict the film as "too symbolic, too slow, boring, too 70's."

The point is, there is no point. The central vision of the film is enigma, the void, mystery. This seems to make a lot of explainers uncomfortable, but the use of emptiness at the core of a work of art is nothing new. "The hand that erases writes the true thing" Faulkner's masterpiece "The Sound and the Fury" is about a character who is absent. The characters that surround her, and who actually people the novel? Not all there, lacking, disintegrating, unknown, unwanted, unloved.

If there must be a meaning, it is that nothingness is the biggest threat of all. "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" We fear our disappearance. We'd like to believe that our little lives, our little comments, our little film lists will endure forever. But they won't. Nothing will.

what is existence? a random ever-changing collection of energized particles.

At any point, we can cross the line into nothingness. Nature will subsume us.

The film "A Passage to India" had the same theme. It was NOT essentially a movie about rape or sex scandal. It was about the yawning pitch-black eternal emptiness of the caves. It drove two women mad. Nature as an amoral uncaring unmoveable eternal reality.

Just as Picnic was NOT about repressed Victorian sexuality. These were pretexts, and were utilized because the fear of sex is the fear of letting go. The fear of sexuality leads irrestibly to our main fear: that darkness, emptiness, and the powers of nature will overwhelm us and erase us.

In Picnic, there was no villain, no enemy, no fall guy, no perpetrator, process or predicament that we could blame for the girls' disappearance. They simply disappeared. And that is the scariest nightmare of all.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is a masterpiece of psychological fiction in which we see an awful thing happen from a great distance and are only given enough clues to guess at what happened to the missing girls. Excellent cinematography and a musical score perfectly chosen both of which become Weir trademarks first appear in this film. They are clearly missing in the Cars that Ate Paris his first full length film. Though many people have offered suggestions both realistic and absurd as to what happened to the ladies, everything but Dingo attacks have been suggested, we are kept in the dark on purpose. The novel that the film was based on suggested, almost as an afterthought, that the story might be true. This claim was as much a fiction as the rest of the novel.

The site, Hanging Rock, is identified with a mythic highway man and all the things we observe happening have elements of the supernatural. The people as in many Weir films communicate the most critical ideas with out talking. A significant plot development in this film, we hear thoughts..see people moving on ward as if drawn towards their doom, but Weir never bothers us with needless Dialog..how much weaker would the plot be if we heard Miranda calling to her companions "follow me, we must reach the top." It is also critical to the developing sense of spirituality and intuitive communication we see in Gallipoli and Witness.

Finally, if we knew what happened to the girls, any speculation about the fate of those at the school would be moot. The mystery explains the accusations by the girls, parents and staff and the eventual downfall of most who worked there.

Those who do not like the film fail to see it as an Aussie Gothic film as innovative in its day as Wuthering Heights was in its.

I remember reading (God knows where) someone's shaggy-dog story about this film. Apparently, this individual had a friend (as people who tell these kind of stories tend to) who went to see 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' sometime in the mid 1970s. He was late, there was the inevitable confusion, and he consequently spent the next two hours whimpering in fear - waiting for the chainsaw-wielding assassin to appear and rip into a bunch of immaculately attired Edwardian schoolgirls.

This is probably as good an analogy as any for the sense of dread this film (fitfully) manages to accumulate. Watching it is like seeing weather systems build. Small increments appear, converge on other increments, circling each other ambiguously before merging into a grey, baleful mass that sits there on the horizon, making atmospheric noises. In 'Picnic...' the wind moves plangently through eucalypts, clocks tick, an orphan girl is the victim of snobbish behaviour, girls gossip, more clocks tick, the wind moves through more eucalypts, the clocks stop, something 'unspeakably eerie' happens, and that's pretty much it.

Ultimately, the film is about Peter Weir placing markers of European culture - corsets, watches, a locally built replica of an Eighteenth century English manor - in the vast, contoured, deeply ambivalent Australian hinterland, and letting his camera record the absurdity of those spatial relationships. His early twentieth century Australians anxiously encircle themselves with the accoutrements of civilization they've brought with them - its dress codes, its class politics, its architectural styles - as if shielding their bodies from the unfamiliar landscape outside. Yet their attempts to maintain a European identity by 'keeping up appearances' come off as merely obsessional.

The elaborate dresses the girls wear, the formalities observed at the picnic (and at a surreal dinner party set on a flat, sunblasted lake edge - a Seurat painting gone horribly wrong), far from being emblems that mark a cultural continuity unifying Australia with Europe, seem oddly fetishistic - deeply arbitrary. Weir's characters seem to sense this meaninglessness also; they're enervated, without conviction. They seem to realize that, in bearing items of European material culture within this new environment, they're merely in possession of a bunch of dead letters - signifiers rendered powerless (decontextualized) by distance. As more than one character remarks, 'it all looks different here'.

To add to the unease, Weir intercuts all this with shots of the landscape - huge, forested, confrontationally empty. There's a sense of something staring back, unimpressed, 'personified' by the oddly biomorphic shapes within Hanging Rock itself.

One can still feel the reverberations, twenty five years on. There are definite echoes of 'Picnic...' in 'The Piano', 'The Virgin Suicides', and the whole slew of films that erstwhile Antipodean Sam Neill rather dodgily categorises the 'Cinema of Unease'. If you really want to freak yourself out, try watching this and 'The Quiet Earth' in the same sitting. You may never feel absolute faith in your ties to the physical universe again.