Review of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) by Michael W — 29 Aug 2007

As all great mysteries, this one has no solution. when answered, a question ceases to be a question and loses all relevance - focus moves to either the answer or, more likely, the next question. answered questions lose the power of wonder and the lure of the unknown (or unknowable), and the greatest mysteries in life, those unable to be answered, are those which humans have spent the most energy expounding upon; most significantly, the question of death.

childhood is fraught with such unknowable elements, and while the mysteries of adulthood may become elucidated eventually, at the excruciating moment of childlike wonderment (intolerable in its unceasing suspense), the time seems to stretch on infinitely, the questions, for all intents and purposes, unanswerable.

how appropriate, then, that this loiterous movie exhausts all its energy on the problem, not the solution. the girls, on the verge of sexual knowledge, understand perfectly the horror of both the unanswered and the answers which one fears to know.

what terrible fate befell the missing girls? it's safer and easier for us to not know, and to always be able to impose the answer we want, rather than what is true, on such a frightful situation. if the pacing of the movie seems slow, consider the intolerable dragging on of adolescence, and the helplessness of both children and women of the period (and perhaps today) in the face of stifling social conventions.

would we, or the girls, really chose to know what happened even if the choice were given to us? knowing what happened to the girls would inevitably remove us from the comfort of speculation and the possible (maybe they're safe; maybe they're just lost) to the concrete of reality, and possibly cause us to fall from the freedom of the unknown into the confinement of the real.