Picnic At Hanging Rock

The use of elliptical narrative in films dates back to the silent era but it wasn’t until the early 1960s that the work of Michelangelo Antonioni and Alain Resnais popularised the technique. Films such as L’Avventura and Last Year In Marienbad deliberately obscured traditional story, replacing it with an open ended series of possible interpretations. Some critics and audiences were infuriated by this refusal to provide answers, not realising that the whole point of the film was to be a series of riddles with no solutions. Find an answer to what happened the previous year at Marienbad and the film has no purpose – it is a mystery that has to remain a mystery. The enjoyment for an audience in such films is in trying to decide for themselves what is going on and, meanwhile, sitting back and wallowing in the aesthetic pleasures of the film. Peter Weir’s Picnic At Hanging Rock is one of the finest of all elliptical films, a vivid and sensual portrait of a summer’s day in Australia at the turn of the century which has at its centre one of the great cinematic puzzles; what happened that afternoon at Hanging Rock ?

The film is based on a novel by Joan Lindsay and concerns the strange (and fictional) events of 14th February 1900, when a small party of girls and three adults travelled from the Appleyard College in Victoria to have a picnic lunch at Hanging Rock. During the course of the long, late summer afternoon, four girls leave the main group to ‘take some measurements’ of the rock. They lie down to rest and, suddenly, three of the girls vanish leaving the fourth, Edith, behind. She runs back to the party to discover that one of the teachers, Miss McCraw, has vanished as well. Over the next few days, extensive searches produce nothing until an English teenager, Michael (Guard), finds one of the missing girls, Irma, and brings her home. However, Irma has lost her memory and is quite unable to offer any explanations.

Peter Weir is an unusual director in that he is able to turn his hand to both period and contemporary subjects with apparent ease. Picnic At Hanging Rock was his second film and his first attempt at a historical drama. His command of atmosphere and place is quite extraordinary and it’s a skill that he has since demonstrated in the First World War film Gallipoli and his most recent film, the marvellously stirring Master and Commander. Weir never wallows in period detail in the manner of, for example, James Ivory, preferring instead to capture the feeling of the time. He works with his ace cinematographer Russell Boyd to capture a sense of late summer languor, a sunlit haze that is first restful and then unnerving. The only recent film I can think of which captures this strange combination of feelings on a late summer day quite as well is Stephen Poliakoff’s underrated Close My Eyes. The atmosphere of repressed emotion, shattered by Edith’s scream, is palpably stifling with the scene where the girls are allowed to remove their gloves offering an erotic frisson that is quite startling. This repression is the focus of the second half of the film. It’s as if the odd, perhaps supernatural events at the rock have unleashed something wordless and terrifying that breaks through the upper middle class politesse and refuses to be forced back. Gradually, the mannered veneer of the school – all second-hand notions of what a young ladies’ public school education in England might have been like, seemingly based on Mrs Appleyard’s reading rather than much knowledge of education – starts to crack and Mrs Appleyard herself cracks along with it. This is brilliantly portrayed by Rachel Roberts and Weir captures it through little details – a drunken leer, hair slowly becoming more out of place – rather than melodramatic ranting.

The look of the film is vitally important, given the cryptic nature of the story, and the use of colour, focus and shading is masterly. The opening ten or fifteen minutes of the film is all sunlit pastels, as befits a genteel boarding school, and then the earthy browns and greys of the rock begin to dominate. Shadows start to loom and gradually a heat haze seems to envelop the lens as we see the girls vanishing into the rock. Then, suddenly, red breaks into the frame, as if – again – to represent all that has been suppressed in the lives of the girls and, extending the story to include the French mistress, the teachers. The ever-present spectre of sexuality, carefully kept out of the school curriculum, is hinted at through the conversations between Michael and a servant, but romantic love – and by extension, perhaps sexual love – is never far from the girls’ thoughts. They read passionate poetry, they caress each other, they hold hands, they idealise the beautiful Miranda – one of the missing girls - and they lead inner lives which we are only partially allowed to know. When the inner life breaks through – as it does when one of the girls at the school is involved in tragedy, or when Irma arrives at a dancing lesson dressed in a brash red dress – it precipitates disaster. There’s a genuinely chilling scene when the girls surround Irma and begin shouting questions as if subjecting her to a kangaroo court. Meanwhile, one of the teachers is busily engaged in her own little Sadean fantasies. But none of this is pushed into our faces. It is all hinted at through the filmmaking in a way which I find completely dazzling.

This is a very filmic piece of work but it also has a pleasingly literary feel to it, not unlike the one which informs other great movies like The Queen of Spades and Kind Hearts And Coronets. If I can define this, it’s the sense that one is seeing the rich, satisfying interior life of a novel put up on screen. It’s very hard to do and requires an extremely confident filmmaker to do it. You feel completely involved in this world and this time and when it’s over you feel slightly dislocated and not ready to go back to your own place in history. There are literary allusions in Picnic At Hanging Rock too. Picnics in nineteenth and early twentieth century literature frequently go awry – you might think of the Box Hill picnic which results in Emma Woodhouse having to remake her own sense of self, or the trip to the Marabar Caves in Forster’s A Passage To India which ends just as disastrously as the one to Hanging Rock. But this isn’t to suggest that there’s anything prosaic about Weir’s film. Indeed, it may well be one of the greatest fantasy films ever made and it takes wing because it’s so free of tedious exposition.

The actors do a fine job considering that the roles aren’t especially rewarding. If one mentions Rachel Roberts, it’s partly because she’s got the best part but also because she gives such a memorable performance. It’s not easy to play this kind of late Victorian schoolmistress without going into cliché but she manages to underplay the discipline while keeping an edge of wistfulness which is vital to her very last scene. It probably helps a lot that Roberts’ own life was a similar battle between social convention and the need to find something better and many of her performances are, for me, shaded by the knowledge of her sad death. The other actors do a reasonable job with a young Helen Morse coming across well as the French mistress. The main sore thumb is Dominic Guard. The gaucheness which was so vital to The Go-Between just seems a little embarrassing here and his role – severely edited in the Director’s Cut – doesn’t really suggest any need for him to be English.

Enigmas are only interesting until they are solved. Peter Weir realises this and deliberately avoids giving any explanations at all. Indeed, there are so many possibilities that its possible for each viewer to come up with their own and feel that it is as good as any other. I’m not going to engage in the discussion here because it’s entirely beside the point. Picnic At Hanging Rock is a beautiful, moving and powerful piece of filmmaking that remains one of the greatest puzzles every put on film. The last thing it needs is to be pinned down.

The Disc

Although a Criterion edition of Picnic At Hanging Rock has been available for a while, this Pathe edition – while not up to Crit standards - is a lot cheaper and offers a reasonable presentation of the film.

The film is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.77:1 and has been anamorphically enhanced. This puts it, in theory, one-up over the Criterion non-anamorphic transfer, but in most other respects it is inferior. That’s not to say it’s a poor transfer but there is a slightly grainy appearance to the image and some artefacting present. Colours are generally excellent though. There is some print damage evident in places with some dust and minor scratches visible. However, this is a vast improvement on the VHS release with a much more detailed and striking appearance.

The soundtrack is Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo. The Criterion DVD is in 5.1 but, by all accounts, was largely monophonic except for the music and some dialogue effects. The same can be said for this track which sees the music spreading over the two channels and dialogue sometimes being placed left or right. The .1 LFE was used sparingly but effectively on the Criterion release but is, naturally, not used here.

There are no extras included on the disc. Nor are subtitles included, a thoughtless omission.

This is a great movie and still one of Peter Weir’s most effective films. This DVD is acceptable and pretty good value for its £5.99 retail price, especially as you can find it cheaper online and in some highstreet stores.