At the turn of the century, on Valentine�s Day, a genteel English girl�s boarding school in Australia sets out for a picnic at a nearby marvel, Hanging Rock. That day, three students and one teacher disappeared and were never found. The fact that this is an Aboriginal spiritual site only adds to the speculation of what happened to these women, whose bodies were never found.
This story is taken into the most gorgeous, 1970s Laura-Ashley style soft-focus romanticism. It focuses on the beautiful Miranda, who is clearly the school�s show girl, and is almost ecstatically adored by everybody. Adolescent sensuality is thoroughly exploited and there is more than a hint of lesbian eroticism, as the girls read each other Valentine poems and languorously comb each other�s hair.
As we watch these delectable scenes, the girls cease to be those familiar, staid products of British colonialism. This is a film that sets up and exploits that old opposition of Nature and Culture. Miranda and her chums wander off, and slowly we see the rock itself begin to captivate the girls as they climb. From this point onwards we never see anything from the girls� point of view, producing them as Other, untouchable, implying they are lost to us even before their disappearance. Fans of Laura Mulvey or Edward Said should be queueing up to study this film.
The fear this produces is the age-old fear of the uncanny and the unknowable; one of the most terrifying moments I can recall is simply a back-view shot of Miranda and two of the girls advancing implacably, sublimely, inhumanly, into the rock. These moments are built up to in an almost unbearable intensity by the contrast between playbacks of previous pieces of dialogue and sounds, and shots of the unspeaking, unmoving rock. The effect is ghostly and uncanny, to say the least.
The rest of the film deals with the consequences of these events. It is not a happy film, and the strain of the disappearances tell on everybody involved in different ways, including the brilliantly-acted Mrs Appleyard. The spell of the rock is still upon them all in some way, however, producing obsessions, vitriolic attacks, and suicides amongst the characters.
Picnic at Hanging Rock is a perfect film while managing not to be in any way formulaic. The acting is perfect, the script is tantalisingly real, and the direction and cinematography are to die for. |
