Picnic at Hanging Rock review

Fresh on the heels of director Peter Weir's smash hit "The Truman Show" comes his first international success and most poetically eerie movie, "Picnic at Hanging Rock," the Australian sensation that electrified audiences in 1975 with its unique blend of mysticism and budding eros. This new 35mm restoration includes re-edited footage that returns "Hanging Rock" to the version Weir originally intended.

In 1900, a teacher at an exclusive all-girl finishing school takes some of her students on a warm Valentine's Day picnic hike to the magical national landmark Ayers Rock. When one of the girls awakes after taking an afternoon nap, she looks around and notices three others have vanished, leaving behind their stockings and shoes as they climbed up the rock formation. Police are called, and one of the cops spends the night on the rock in hopes of finding them; all he gains is to wake up the next morning with an unexplained head wound. One of the girls even reappears with a similar gash on her head, and is likewise in the dark.

Based on the novel by Joan Lindsay, Weir's "Hanging Rock" reinvents its story (Lindsay claimed it was true) as a visual intoxication, with Russell Boyd's cinematography of the rugged beauty Down Under weighing in with equal import against Cliff Green's screenplay adaptation. What actually happens is never explained, which is the point: the film becomes a study in anxiety, not only of the adults responsible for the children, but the teenagers themselves, for which everything is changing, including the developing sensuality of their budding bodies and how it colors the world around them. There is a loss of innocence when logic disappears and the irrational takes over: a sense that nothing can ever really be trusted again, or considered safe. In a very real sense, the Victorian staging and sensibility of "Hanging Rock"'s elegant horror story is the perfect parable for the dissolution of an era--an apt shoehorn into the jaded postmodernism of the twentieth century.--Stephen Garrett