Peter Weir’s film Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) creates a palpably dream-like atmosphere … a world of golden glows and gentle whispers, where the characters exist as hazy, evocative recollections. The film opens with the statement … "On Saturday, 14 February 1900, a party of schoolgirls from Appleyard College picnicked at Hanging Rock near Mt. Macedon in the state of Victoria. During the afternoon, several members of the party disappeared without trace ..."
Based on a book by Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock takes us to the girls' finishing school in Australia, where the teenage girls embark on a picnic to a local landmark – a near-vertical precipice called the Hanging Rock. While the girls rest at the foot of the rock, a group of four girls begins to traverse the rock. However, something unexplained happens and three of the girls fail to return. And soon afterwards one of their teachers follows and she also disappears. Search parties scour the vicinity of the rock but no traces of the three girls and their teacher are found. Weir doesn't provide any worldly explanations for the disappearances. He allows the mystery to stand … and focuses on how everyone else reacts to the disappearances … possible explanations abound but Weir only provides tantalizing hints. The whispered voice-over of a line from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, "What we see and what we seem, are but a dream. A dream within a dream," spoken by Miranda, one of the schoolgirls is a more telling introduction to the film.
However, while the movie doesn't provide a definitive physical explanation for the disappearances, Weir loads the movie with clues that the disappearances should be viewed as metaphorical. For instance, the main events take place on Saint Valentine's Day – the most romantic day of the year. However, the teenage girls are trapped at a girls-only school. As a result, they pass Valentine's cards among themselves and breathlessly read love poems to each other. In this land of sexual repression and misplaced sexual yearnings, the girls venture to a towering rock … with possible phallic implications … and four girls in the party begin to climb higher and higher up the slopes. One girl turns around and runs screaming down the rock but the others take off their shoes … a sign that they are breaking from repressions, and as the camera idealizes them in a golden haze, they begin their final slow-motion ascent. On a metaphorical level, the movie suggests that the girls' have become enraptured by the rock's magnetic pull and they have embarked on a hypnotic journey to a mythical never-never land of higher fulfillment.
Unlike the novel, the film is dreamlike, mysterious, and filled with implications. The fatal picnic takes place in an environment described by, among others, one of the first Australian poets, Charles Harpur:
Not a sound disturbs the air,
There is quiet everywhere;
Over plains and over woods
What a mighty stillness broods.
All the birds and insects keep
Where the coolest shadows sleep …
There are many unresolved incidents in the film and many characters filled with many layers of meaning. Weir intentionally leaves these and other questions unanswered, mysterious.
In the film's final sequence a voice-over commentary provides information about the fate of Mrs. Appleyard. Her body is found at the base of Hanging Rock, and it is believed that she fell while attempting to climb it. The same voice informs us that the search for the missing girls and their governess continued for the next few years without success and that their disappearance remains a mystery. These last words are accompanied by an extreme slow-motion evocation of the picnic scene under the Rock. Miranda is shown waving goodbye, and the freeze-frame of her turning her head away from the camera ends the film. The shot fades out, leaving the viewer intrigued, bewildered, mystified.
I saw this film on television when I was in school. Though I could not understand the film at that time, its haunting beauty remained a memory. I just remembered the name and years later when I got a DVD copy, it was like a dream come true ...
