Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) – P. Weir

Perhaps knowing that the mystery at the centre will remain a mystery removes some of the tension from Peter Weir’s otherwise seductive film on subsequent viewings.  Why these Victorian schoolgirls (Victorian era and State of Victoria) on day’s outing vanish (and where to) is open to speculation. Perhaps conflating this film with the director’s subsequent The Last Wave (1978), with its much more overt focus on Indigenous people’s different ways of knowing, made me suspect that the girls had entered a sort of Dreamtime state, fixated on the strange volcanic outgrowth called Hanging Rock.  I can’t profess to understand.  The combination of ominous shots of the rocks (and native fauna and flora), Zamfir’s pan flute, and a very gauzy sometimes sun-dappled cinematography by Russell Boyd might also lend itself to this interpretation. But there is also another force here, that of awakening sexuality, which seems to burn in some of the girls (for each other?) and perhaps in two boys who see the girls on their way to disappearing. Weir juxtaposes the young people in nature and in their more “civilised” environment – a girl’s school ruled with a heavy hand by principal Rachel Roberts – where repression is the norm (and urges must be controlled).  A subplot finds Roberts unable to deal with the rebellious Sara who feels intensely toward Miranda one of the vanished girls, leading to a more decided tragedy. One would hope that the missing girls (and their maths teacher) find themselves in a better freer place (but perhaps not abducted by UFOs as original author Joan Lindsay apparently later speculated). Weir’s (and Lindsay’s) gambit that the story has a true origin may be more symbolic than literal, allowing viewers to invest in the mystery of their own existence.