Picnic at Hanging Rock

The 1975 Peter Weir drama, about a turn-of-the-century schoolteacher and four girls who vanish during an Outback getaway, returns with this director's cut.

Weir's grand-mystery style shines in 1975's 'Picnic'

By Joe Baltake, Bee Movie Critic, (Published July 17, 1998)

Rating: Four stars Cast: Rachel Roberts, Dominic Guard, Helen Morse, Jacki Weaver, Vivean Gray, Kristy Child, Anne Lambert, Karen Robson, Jane Vallis and Christine Schuler. Director: Peter Weir. Writer: Hossein Amini. Running time: 103 minutes.

Moviegoers who have discovered Australian filmmaker Error! Bookmark not defined. just recently from his marvelous work on "Error! Bookmark not defined." -- or, going back a dozen or so years, on "Witness" (1985) -- would do well to further their movie education and check out his second film, "Picnic at Hanging Rock."

Made in 1975 but released in this country in 1979, this is the movie that established Weir's reputation among critics and film scholars, introducing his distinct sensibility, his way with mystical storytelling and enigmatic film techniques. Weir has a way of turning stories into grand mysteries, as he vividly demonstrates in the "The Truman Show" -- and as he did in his first movie, the black comedy "The Cars That Ate Paris" (1974) and his third, "The Last Wave" (1977). In "Picnic at Hanging Rock," he's working with a full-scale mystery, a piece of fiction which he presents as fact.

Based on a novel by Lady Joan Lindsay, the movie is about the strange disappearance of three young women and its aftermath. It could have been told in a tense, straightforward way, but Weir sexualizes it through coded talk, imagery and soft, sensual camera work. He turns it into a film about the loss of innocence -- of women escaping the sexual repression of the era in which they live (1900) and especially of the finishing school where they've been imprisoned. Their journey into the unknown can be read as a carnal discovery.

Now, if you get the impression that "Picnic at Hanging Rock" is smutty, you're wrong. Weir and his scenarist Cliff Green convey all of this subtly -- via nuance and haunting symbolism. Weir's opening scene -- staged at Appleyard College in Victoria, Australia -- depicts a student body of girls blossoming among the school's repression. The sinister atmosphere is set in place.

It's St. Valentine's Day, and four of the girls -- all dressed in virginal white -- decide to go on a hike to Hanging Rock, a 500-foot-high volcanic formation. This is something of a forbidden area of rocks and boulders that vaguely resemble aspects of the male and female form.

They take a break, picnic and nap, but when one of the girls wakes up, she discovers the other three have wondered off, climbing higher for a little exploration from which they never return. A different kind of mystery follows -- an existential thriller that is heightened by Weir's use of sound (the humming of bugs is amplified) and by Russell Boyd's woozy cinematography.

Boyd, who shot the film at a variety of odd angles, reportedly veiled his cameras with transparent orange-yellow cloth to give the outdoor scenes a creepy otherworldliness. It conveys the sad but necessary realization that, once gone, childhood and innocence can never return.

Incidentally, for this incarnation of his film, Weir went back to the editing room and removed seven minutes of film for a new director's cut.

If "The Truman Show" and "Picnic at Hanging Rock" whet your appetite for more Weir, I suggest you stage your own Peter Weir Film Festival. Rent "The Last Wave," a courtroom drama about an aborigine accused of murder; "The Cars That Ate Paris," in which the people of Paris, Australia, keep their economy going by inducing automobile accidents; and the unexpected "Green Card" (1990), a warm comedy that investigates the mysteries of star Gerard Depardieu.

from the online movie club