Picnic at Hanging Rock
Diaphanous Mystery | 115 Minutes | 1975 | Australia
(3.5/4)
Director: Peter Weir | Producers: Hal and Jim McElroy | Screenplay: Ciff Green | Based on: Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay | Starring: Rachel Roberts, Dominic Guard, Helen Morse, Jacki Weaver, Margaret Nelson, Karen Robson, Christine Schuler, Anne-Louise Lambert, Jane Vallis, John Jarratt | Music: Bruce Smeaton | Cinematography: Russell Boyd | Editor: Max Lemon
On the morning of Saint Valentine’s Day, one Saturday in 1900, the schoolgirls boarding at Appleyard College near the small Australian town of Woodend, Victoria prepare for a day picnicking at Hanging Rock. In raptures they recite poetry from the Valentine’s cards they have presumably sent one another; they put on their muslin dresses, and in a cross between a balletic embrace and an evolutionary procession, they awkwardly help each other with their corsets; and then they are off, not before a word from the stern headmistress Mrs. Appleyard, who warns them against wandering and of the dangers of the Australian wildlife, reminding them that although it is warm, for the sake of modesty they must wait until they are beyond the town before removing their gloves. She expects the girls back in time for a light supper, but at the rock three of them vanish as if into thin air.
One girl, Sara, in punishment for something undisclosed, is not allowed to attend the picnic, and she waves to her friend Miranda from the balustrade atop the schoolhouse. Already there is a faint disquiet over the school, the headmistress, and the schoolgirls themselves, sun-dappled and romantic, depicted dreamily and gauzily atop sinuous panpipes. They are overripe, and there is a precarious balance between the girls as they sit primly in the back of the carriage and the schoolboys who chase through the town in their wake; between the cosseted elegance of the girls and the working town; between the two young men who haggle over alcohol in the vicinity of the picnic; between the Valentine’s cake which Miranda cuts in half, plunging the knife, and the ground beneath teeming with bugs. Meanwhile the rock hums.
Picnic at Hanging Rock, directed by Peter Weir with cinematography by Russell Boyd and music by Bruce Smeaton, one of the defining works of the Australian New Wave, is one of the most dreamy and open-ended gestures on film. When the three girls plus a straggling teacher go missing, somehow lost within the crevices of Hanging Rock, the film doesn’t ask us to speculate on what has happened to them, and in this sense carries none of the visceral thrills of an ordinary mystery. Instead it suggests that we ponder more vaguely and abstractly, on the type of things that might happen to young girls in such a situation, on symbols and allegories, on underlying causes and what it all might mean.
Certainly there are angles: have the girls simply fallen into the bush, should we suspect Michael Fitzhubert, the young Englishman who follows someway after the girls, straying from his lunch with his uncle and aunt, or perhaps even the mathematics teacher Miss McCraw, who we discover followed the girls deep into the rock wearing just her undergarments? Later in the film we might also come to suspect Mrs. Appleyard, whose sternness with Sara turns into something more sinister while she struggles with fees in the face of a crumbling school. Yet it’s hard to escape the impression that the girls’ absence is indefinable, something simply beyond our grasp. Each step they take up and into the rock, buttressed by pipes, choral chants, classical music and ancestral rumbling, while lizards creep and flocks of birds fly overhead, is at once an epiphany, rhythmic and transgressive and brimming with portent.
More than a week after the girls have gone missing, Sara tells the pretty French teacher Mademoiselle de Poitiers that Miranda knew ‘Secrets. She knew she wouldn’t come back’. The prelude to the excursion sees Miranda tell Sara – strangely mute through the film’s first few scenes – ‘You must learn to love someone else apart from me […] I won’t be here much longer’. At the rock it is Miranda who leads the departing group. Each of the girls has a type, foreboding in their own particularities. Miranda is ethereal, in a way that suggests longing through sorrow, a shattered but abiding longing to escape. She is drawn implacably up the rock. Irma is more puckish and outwardly daring. And Marion is analytical, prim and scientific in a way that equally separates her from the rest of the school. In the morning she presses a rose between sheets of paper on a desk littered with compasses, and before the girls disappear she looks down on her sleeping classmates and observes, ‘A surprising number of human beings are without purpose, though it is probable that they are performing some function unknown to themselves’. As the girls talk, portals open up.
In one of the film’s blunter gestures, the portly Edith who lags behind the other three is portrayed as more earthbound: she bows her head to the dirt as the others gaze at the rock face, and when they disappear she runs back down with a piercing scream. Nobody can really elucidate what happened, or quite recall the sequence of the day’s events. Two watches stopped at twelve. Bugs threatened to infest the picnic. Lizards roamed and birds flew but the girls wilted in the heat, and fell dazed or asleep.
About a week after the picnic, Irma is found by Albert Crundall, the Fitzhuberts’ coachman, thanks to a clue provided by Michael who has spent day and night searching the rock: in the novel by Joan Lindsay from which the film was adapted, the clue is a scrawled note, but here it is a piece of lace torn from one of the girls’ dresses. Irma’s hands and nails are ripped and broken, her head is bruised, but she is ‘intact’ and has no marks on her feet, inexplicable since she was found wearing neither stockings nor shoes.
There are other signs and symbols. Do the swans, floating placidly at the Fitzhubert residence, represent desire or flight or else embellish the mystery? Hanging Rock is full of passageways and openings, but in profile seems to stare out stolidly over the surrounds. Interpretations of Picnic at Hanging Rock often follow two threads. One sees both the film and the novel as an evocation of the discontinuity between Australia’s colonial present and its indigenous past, presence in absence and absence in presence. Hanging Rock after all had been an important ceremonial site for Indigenous Australian tribes for thousands of years before it became a picnic ground for the colonisers, represented in different ways by the schoolgirls and the Fitzhuberts. The other sees the film in particular, with its sensuous languor and period dress, as a subversion of Victorian mores around female sexuality. Cosseted within the close confines of Appleyard College, overseen by a stern disciplinarian, the atmosphere among the girls bristles with a sort of stuffy voluptuousness and heightened mental states sometimes bordering on delirium.
The gardener and the maid at Appleyard, earthier and more practical, offer a homely and carnal riposte, but otherwise the school is all sublimated lust and threats and veiled or misconstrued desire. There is the theme of doubling in the relationships between Miranda and Sara, Michael and Albert – who at first appear almost as apparitions of one another – and perhaps also between Mrs. Appleyard, Miss McCraw, and Marion, variously in the realms of authority, mourning dress, and trigonometry. The film suggests that Albert and Sara are actually estranged brother and sister: briefly they paint impressionistic portraits remembering each other.
In fact each scene in Picnic at Hanging Rock is not only carefully composed, but sometimes framed and suspended like an Impressionist painting: of the rock itself, or of the girls in slumber. Weir and Boyd, drawing from the experiments of photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson, draped bridal veil over the camera lens to produce the film’s diaphanous soft-focus. Its cadenced throngs also evoke the Renaissance, and Mme de Poitiers in one of the film’s resonant lines says ‘I know that Miranda is a Botticelli angel’. No doubt some people find Picnic at Hanging Rock meandering and self-indulgent, perhaps better to say self-absorbed. Through the thick air that hangs over the movie, stilted and enclosed, we sense that even more than the picture itself, the girls are not going to bend to our whims much less disclose their secrets.
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