#11 - PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK
What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream.
Picnic At Hanging Rock
1975
Director: Peter Weir
Starring: Rachel Roberts, Anne-Louise Lambert, Margaret Nelson
A group of schoolgirls sets off in 1900 Australia for a Valentine's Day picnic to the natural formation known as Hanging Rock. Three girls and a teacher wander off during the day. They do not return.
If ever a film was magical - really, truly, inexplicably magical - this film is it.
Please, if you seek out this film, do not expect a normal film. Most movies (and moviemakers) would use the set-up of Picnic At Hanging Rock to make a taut suspense thriller. Not Peter Weir. He instead swims lazily along, hypnotizing the audience, lulling them, calling them softly, gently inviting them to enter the thick, hazy world of dreams that is this film. There are no answers. None. The girls' disappearance is never explained. There's not even a hint of an explanation. Don't try to find one - you're missing the point.
So what is the point? The point is mood. This movie absolutely drips with mood. I don't remember things that happened in the film so much as I remember how it made me feel. How DID it make me feel, then? It made me feel dopey. It made me feel like I had entered some sort of modern Wonderland that had skewed my senses and washed away my sense of time. It made me feel as if I was floating in some sort of hazy, gauzy cloud, beautiful and ephemeral, fleeting and delicate. This sense of mood is irrevocably strong, like some sort of potent opiate. It makes you feel as though you, too, are outside on a lazy summer day, lulled into sleep by the sounds of nature around you and the food from your picnic.
Miranda (Lambert), one of the girls who wanders off, is somehow at the core of the film. Hers is a truly staggering beauty. She is shot almost entirely in soft focus, a touch that seems to emphasize how ethereal she is. She seems mysteriously aware of her impending "danger," warning her friend Sara (Nelson), an orphan and a loner at the school, to make friends with other people, as she will not be around very long. Miranda is strange and beautiful, melancholic and startlingly clairvoyant.
Sexual frustration and hysteria is clearly one of the major themes of the film. The Victorian school is an institute of repression, and the girls are given free rein at their picnic in nature. Critics have drawn comparisons between Hanging Rock itself and any sort of sexuality, swallowing up and consuming the pubescent girls before they progress in society. Schoolgirl crushes abound at the school, the most notable being that of Sara for Miranda. Sara is despondent over the loss of the beautiful angel Miranda, as is a young man who saw Miranda moments before she disappeared.
The contrast between Victorian culture and the rough Australian outback is a hallmark of Australian films from the seventies. It's fascinating watching the prim and proper schoolgirls trying to contend with the sheer power and magnitude of the nature that surrounds them. They seem dreadfully out of place in this weird land of volcanic rock and sunbleached fields.
The narrative in the film is completely elliptical - again, this is nonlinear storytelling. Don't expect a conventional beginning, middle, and end, they don't exist. One of the missing girls returns a week after the initial disappearance, but far from solving the mystery, it only deepens it. The girl cannot remember anything, which leads to only more maddening questions. If you accept the questions, if you accept the ambiguity, it will only heighten your enjoyment of this film. Please don't try to make sense of the story. It's a mystery that is not meant to be unraveled.
I have never FELT a more dreamlike film. Many movies have fantasy sequences, but ultimately, they do not FEEL like a fantasy. This film, however, absolutely does feel like a dream; hazy, uncertain, and languorous.
Picnic At Hanging Rock
1975
Director: Peter Weir
Starring: Rachel Roberts, Anne-Louise Lambert, Margaret Nelson
A group of schoolgirls sets off in 1900 Australia for a Valentine's Day picnic to the natural formation known as Hanging Rock. Three girls and a teacher wander off during the day. They do not return.
If ever a film was magical - really, truly, inexplicably magical - this film is it.
Please, if you seek out this film, do not expect a normal film. Most movies (and moviemakers) would use the set-up of Picnic At Hanging Rock to make a taut suspense thriller. Not Peter Weir. He instead swims lazily along, hypnotizing the audience, lulling them, calling them softly, gently inviting them to enter the thick, hazy world of dreams that is this film. There are no answers. None. The girls' disappearance is never explained. There's not even a hint of an explanation. Don't try to find one - you're missing the point.
So what is the point? The point is mood. This movie absolutely drips with mood. I don't remember things that happened in the film so much as I remember how it made me feel. How DID it make me feel, then? It made me feel dopey. It made me feel like I had entered some sort of modern Wonderland that had skewed my senses and washed away my sense of time. It made me feel as if I was floating in some sort of hazy, gauzy cloud, beautiful and ephemeral, fleeting and delicate. This sense of mood is irrevocably strong, like some sort of potent opiate. It makes you feel as though you, too, are outside on a lazy summer day, lulled into sleep by the sounds of nature around you and the food from your picnic.
Miranda (Lambert), one of the girls who wanders off, is somehow at the core of the film. Hers is a truly staggering beauty. She is shot almost entirely in soft focus, a touch that seems to emphasize how ethereal she is. She seems mysteriously aware of her impending "danger," warning her friend Sara (Nelson), an orphan and a loner at the school, to make friends with other people, as she will not be around very long. Miranda is strange and beautiful, melancholic and startlingly clairvoyant.
Sexual frustration and hysteria is clearly one of the major themes of the film. The Victorian school is an institute of repression, and the girls are given free rein at their picnic in nature. Critics have drawn comparisons between Hanging Rock itself and any sort of sexuality, swallowing up and consuming the pubescent girls before they progress in society. Schoolgirl crushes abound at the school, the most notable being that of Sara for Miranda. Sara is despondent over the loss of the beautiful angel Miranda, as is a young man who saw Miranda moments before she disappeared.
The contrast between Victorian culture and the rough Australian outback is a hallmark of Australian films from the seventies. It's fascinating watching the prim and proper schoolgirls trying to contend with the sheer power and magnitude of the nature that surrounds them. They seem dreadfully out of place in this weird land of volcanic rock and sunbleached fields.
The narrative in the film is completely elliptical - again, this is nonlinear storytelling. Don't expect a conventional beginning, middle, and end, they don't exist. One of the missing girls returns a week after the initial disappearance, but far from solving the mystery, it only deepens it. The girl cannot remember anything, which leads to only more maddening questions. If you accept the questions, if you accept the ambiguity, it will only heighten your enjoyment of this film. Please don't try to make sense of the story. It's a mystery that is not meant to be unraveled.
I have never FELT a more dreamlike film. Many movies have fantasy sequences, but ultimately, they do not FEEL like a fantasy. This film, however, absolutely does feel like a dream; hazy, uncertain, and languorous.