The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Mystery drama

DIRECTOR

Peter Weir

WRITERS

Cliff Green (screenplay); Joan Lindsay (novel)

STARS

Rachel Roberts, Anne-Louise Lambert, Vivean Gray, Helen Morse

BEFORE

1974 Weir’s first feature, The Cars That Ate Paris, develops his trademark theme of macabre happenings in a small community.

AFTER

1981 Like Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, Weir’s World War I drama, authentically captures Edwardian Australia.

1989 Weir’s acclaimed US drama, Dead Poets Society, echoes Hanging Rock in its story of a tragedy at a school.

Picnic at Hanging Rock opens with a caption stating that on February 14, 1900, a party of schoolgirls went on a picnic at Hanging Rock near Mount Macedon in the Australian state of Victoria. It ends with the words: “During the afternoon several members of the party disappeared without a trace.” This creates the impression that the story that follows is based on true events—but it isn’t. The movie, made in 1975, is entirely fictitious.

So why are the words there? Are they a trick, or a clue—or both? This is the first of many mysteries posed in this haunting Valentine’s Day trip into the wilds of the Australian bush.

"A movie composed almost entirely of clues. It forces us to stretch our imaginations."

Vincent Canby
The New York Times, 1979

No resolution

The strange events at Hanging Rock were first related in a 1967 novel by Australian author Joan Lindsay, which itself was ambiguous about whether the case of the missing party was true. When Weir came to adapt the book for movie, he faced an unusual challenge: Lindsay had offered no explanation for the story’s central mystery. The three girls and their teacher simply vanish—there is no suggestion of where they go, or why. Could the director expect his audience to sit through a two-hour mystery that has no resolution? Weir’s response was to draw out themes of absence—not only do the girls and Miss McCraw, their teacher, disappear early in the story, but no solutions or clues are found to the questions asked. Another teacher, Mr. Whitehead (Frank Gunnell), is the first to accept that the event is unsolvable—“There’s some questions got answers and some haven’t,” he says simply. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, Weir is asking the viewer to respect the mystery for what it is. A kind of supernatural event seems to have occurred. It has no context and is therefore frightening. Weir builds his drama on this menacing atmosphere, which hums with the stifling heat of the Australian summer. He shoots Hanging Rock as though it were the surface of a hostile alien world, which is what it must have felt like to the characters. The movie is set in 1900, when European settlers were still strangers in an ancient land they did not fully understand.

Irma, Marion, and Miranda share an eerily idyllic moment just before they set off to climb Hanging Rock. Irma will be found later with her corset missing. The other two, along with Miss McGraw, disappear without trace.

Possible hint

There is a hint that sexuality is at the heart of the vanishing. When one of the girls “returns,” unable to put her experience into words, why is her corset missing? Is it significant that the vanishing occurs on Valentine’s Day? Or that the rock itself sits on a dormant volcano, a potential symbol of repressed desire? It’s impossible to know. Any answers to the riddle evaporate in the dry haze of the bush. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, it is the mystery that endures, and not the explanation.

“We shall only be gone a little while.”

Miranda / Picnic at Hanging Rock

Born in Sydney in 1944, Weir started his career making documentaries with Australia’s Commonwealth Film Unit. Associated with the movement dubbed the “Australian New Wave,” which included performers and filmmakers who found international acclaim in the 1970s and 80s, he went on to make movies that focused on communities under strain, his atmospherics mirroring the tumultuous forces affecting the characters’ lives. After the success of his World War I drama Gallipoli, Weir’s films have often been star vehicles that put a man into a closed society and watched him struggle to connect, such as Harrison Ford’s John Book in Witness (1985), set within an Amish community.

1975 Picnic at Hanging Rock

1981 Gallipoli

1989 Dead Poets Society

1998 The Truman Show

What else to watch: Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965) ✵ Wake in Fright (1971) ✵ Walkabout (1971) ✵ The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) ✵ The Blair Witch Project (1999) ✵ The Virgin Suicides (1999) ✵ The Way Back (2010) ✵ The Babadook (2014