A review of the 1975 classic film “Picnic At Hanging Rock”
On Valentine’s Day 1900, students from a girls’ private boarding school in Victoria, Australia have a day out at the titular mountain. Dressed in their white finery and giggling with excitement, these teenage girls inevitably attract the attention of nearby young men. Four of the girls decide to explore the higher reaches of the rock, but only one returns, screaming with terror.
The minimal dialogue, the lingering gaze of the camera, the atmospheric music, the shadows and crevices of the mountain, all create an atmosphere of expectation, but of what? And when the girls disappear, how do the other girls, the school and the wider community react? This haunting and exquisite film is more about mood than narrative.
Based on a 1967 book by Joan Lindsay which is considered to be one of the greatest Australian novels, this cinematic adaptation by Peter Weir has been voted the best Australian movie of all time. But it is a stage and enigmatic work.
As one reviewer (Joshua Klein) explains it: “A ghost story without the ghosts, a puzzle without a solution, a story of sexual repression without the sex” means that the film “remains maddeningly elliptical”. A story without an explanation or a conclusion will irritate some, but Weir has declared: “Life doesn’t have endings. It’s always moving on to something else and there are always unexplained elements.”