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 Picnic at Hanging Rock
(1975)
Director:
Peter Weir
Stars: Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Marlon Brando, Larry Fishburne, Frederick March, Sam Bottoms
Release Company:
The Criterion Collection
MPAA Rating: R
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Dead Poets Society
Poster
Buy at AllPosters.com
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What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream.
Picnic at Hanging Rock creates a haunting atmosphere like few other films that deal with themes of truth and illusion. Set at the turn of the century on Valentine's Day, an Australian boarding school sends a group of girls on an afternoon outing to Hanging Rock, only to have three students and one teacher vanish. One of the girls is found about a week later, but the others are mysteriously lost forever, reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura. Based on Joan Lindsay's 1967 novel, which suggests the events actually occurred, Peter Weir's sensuously photographed film looks like a Renoir painting but borders on Dario Argento's Suspiria, with its sexual and psychological undercurrents.
What is it about boarding schools that bring out the weirdness in their headmasters? Suspiria has one, and Weir's Dead Poet's Society includes a rigid headmaster who wants to preserve a treasured traditional past. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts) runs Appleyard College in Woodend, Victoria with an iron fist, insisting on discipline and ladylike behavior. Her own controlled manner indicates frustration, and she takes it out on non-conformists, like Sara (Margaret Nelson), who writes her own poetry instead of memorizing the lines of Mrs. Appleyard's favorite.
Could there be some sexual tension here? Appleyard's uptightness contains an undercurrent—and why the hostility and confusion she shows towards Sara, who has a mad crush on her roommate, Miranda (Ann Lambert)? But unrequited lesbian love affairs, which may or may not exist, don't comprise the only sexual subtext in Weir's 1975 film.
Dressed in proper white Victorian lace, the nineteen girls take off for their field trip to Hanging Rock like it's a sexual encounter—they practically caress the grounds and rocks as they lounge lazily, reciting love poetry to mark the occasion. Weir's camera sensuously sweeps over their young bodies to catch their subtle gazes and gestures, while the steady drone of cicadas and Zamfir's pan flute music supplies an ethereal sound.
Blonde Miranda and two other attractive girls, Irma (Karen Robson) and Marion (Jane Vallis), wander up the side of Hanging Rock along with chunky Edith (Christine Schuler), the physically challenged outsider, who continually complains on the trek. A stable boy and young Englishman take note of the "lookers," and the latter begins to follow them, but he soon loses track of them. With Victorian Age sensibility, all burning sexual passions remain hidden, and the young man's love will remain forever unrequited.
Or is it? We are never sure why the girls and teacher disappear. One minute they are napping on the rocks in the bright sunshine, then the camera cuts to Edith screaming her head off. Were the girls attacked by stranger or beast? Are supernatural forces at work? Or is the filmmaker treading psychological ground, providing a cinematic Rorschach test for the audience? The film works at various levels and certainly sparks discussion, as people attempt to figure out what they've just seen.
It's evident that special forces are at work. Warned about poisonous snakes, the rocks teem with lizards, snakes, and insect life. At one point the camera closes in on an abandoned sandwich covered with ants, and soon after the girls are high above the others, remarking how they look like ants. Marion immediately states, "A surprising number of human beings are without purpose, though it is probable that they are performing some function unknown to themselves."
And this becomes a question that haunts. To what purpose have these girls led their lives? What unknown force has led them to their destiny at Hanging Rock, since "everything begins and ends at the exactly right time and place." Does the unfathomable mystery have a physical explanation? Is the disappearance strictly psycho-sexual or supernatural? The questions that linger after seeing Weir's masterful Picnic at Hanging Rock reveal as much about you as they do about the dreamy film itself.
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