Another review

Critic: Felicia Feaster

Australian director Peter Weir is fascinated by the membrane separating the world as it appears to us, from the secret, supernatural reality outside of our immediate perception. In his Academy Award-nominated The Truman Show, Weir gives us a character trapped in an existence that feels manufactured, and it turns out to be just that. Truman shares a common predicament with other characters in the Weir-ian canon, like the time-frozen Amish of Witness or the plane-crash survivors in Fearless, whose consciousness has been permanently altered by their brush with death.

What has apparently bewitched Weir throughout his career is the aboriginal concept of "dream time," a phenomenon critic Richard Jameson locates "somewhere between a parallel universe and an all-encompassing vision of reality." One of his more literal meditations on the subject of altered perception was,Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).

The festering, impacted sexuality of the Victorians is its own secret world flowing beneath Picnic, which concerns a group of schoolgirls in 1900 Australia enjoying a Valentine's Day picnic in the outback. While these well-behaved icons of Victorian repression and fragility cling like snowy edelweiss to the safe comfort of a cliff side's shade, four of the schoolgirls set off on an adventure; determined to climb the rocky crag in the distance. As the virgin schoolgirls nap in their picnic whites, the quartet make their way to the forbidden zone their battle-ax headmistress Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts) has warned them of: a region of snakes, treacherous paths and any number of assaults to a young girl's maidenhood. But what Mrs. Appleyard didn't anticipate in her catalog of doom was the symbolically vaginal gash in the stony hilltop, through which, with great gentleness, the girls disappear into thin air.

Weir links the four girls' curiosity -- and also their disappearance -- to their carnality. The leader of the expedition, Miranda (Anne Lambert), is a paragon of Victorian sensuality: blonde, willowy, a "Botticelli angel" who disappears, spirit-like, into the sweet hereafter. The girls' unfulfilled sexuality -- a miasma of erotic crushes, valentines and dreamy poetry, is symbolically fulfilled when they wander into that rocky otherworld. Part of the uneasiness viewers have long associated with the film may not be its supernatural aspect or its refusal to provide explanations for its central mystery. Instead, the eeriness of Weir's film may be due to his association of female desire with the inexplicable, creepy mysteries of nature. Like another Australian film, Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout, about a young girl coming of sexual age as she stumbles, lost, through the barren outback, Weir invests the girls' sexual passage with a fair amount of doom and gloom, as if loss of virginity is a loss of life.

The Victorian fetish for morbidity and romance, fairies and angels, is given wild expression in Weir's flowery sentimentality for the dead girls. Dreamily in sway to its virginal maidens swallowed up by nature, Picnic is as fetishistic about an innocence captured in gauzy, amber sunlight as another bit of '70s Victoriana, Louis Malle's Pretty Baby.

Weir's New Age ethos, of aboriginal legend tempered with Los Angeles spirituality, looms large in Picnic, fortified by the grating woodwind stylings of late-night infomercial maestro Zamfir, whose pan flute provides a treacly, New Age answer to the Christian cherub's harp.

Picnic is a film of tangled -- and often tortuous -- intent. Weir suggests the human fear of nature is justified -- that all of our civility and control is no match for its wild caprice. Both girlhood and nature assume a similar, slightly ominous mystery in the director's eyes, presented as uncharted, mystical phenomena beyond logic. Shot in a flat, harshly realistic style, the dreaminess of Weir's storyline of vanished innocents is unfortunately not matched in any comparably engrossing visual style. Picnic is not Weir's most accomplished work, but it is one of those singular products of a fertile, distinctive imagination which acquire greater complexity with each new film the director produces.