Review of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) by Mjs M — 07 Oct 2009

This film is notable for being the first widely seen film from the great director Peter Weir and secondly for being the first Australian movie to get a wide international audience. The film is set in Australia circa 1900 and deals with a girls boarding school placed on the threshold of the Outback. As the title suggests, the girls go on a picnic in, you guessed it, the hanging rock (which was sort of an odd rock formation in the middle of a desert). The trip goes awry when four of the students seem to go into a trance, walk off, and disappear.

That?s an intriguing set up, but the movie famously offers no resolution to the situation, most of the girls are never found and the disappearance is never explained. So what we?re basically offered here is a mystery with no solution. That is sort of an infuriating set up that hurts the film from really satisfying as a mere story. This can be seen either as a frustration or as a challenge, what would make Weir put something like this together only to leave the audience hanging?

Well, for one thing, we do get the story of how this disappearance effects the people at the school who didn?t disappear. Like the audience they are left baffled and troubled by the experience, the whole thing reminded me of a recent Atom Egoyan film called The Sweet Hereafter. Also, one can look at these girls wearing full Victorian outfits while hiking through this harsh environment, that?s a pretty odd sight and it reminded me of Ray Winstone trying to have Christmas in the middle of the Outback in The Proposition. It would seem that this suggests that European sophistication and the Outback does not mix, people going in with that attitude are only going to get killed. That they artfully disappear rather than tripping into a chasm only underscores the symbolism. One could perhaps come to the conclusion that the rustic ?ocker? behavior that Australia is known for emerged for a reason.

What?s more, the film has some really good scenery (the titular formation is indeed impressive) and it generates some really somber atmosphere. As such this was hard not to respect even if the odd nature of the story makes it sort of an unsatisfactory viewing experience.