- On Saturday 14th 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 a trace...
- I think it's safe to assert that, in most conventional narratives, the audience has a clearer idea about what exactly has transpired by the end of the film than they had at the beginning. In the case of Picnic at Hanging Rock, that assertion is simply untrue. Sure, we have more details, but no more really useful information than is contained in the above summary. We know only that four girls and one instructor went up the rock, and that one girl came back screaming while one other was found suffering from exposure a week later. It is clear that "something terrible has happened," but to say any more would be to indulge in idle speculation.
- And speculate we shall! The last time we saw Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert), Irma (Karen Robson), and Marion (Jane Vallis), they were marching barefoot through a rugged path leading to the top of Hanging Rock. Prior to that, we had noticed several ominous portents, such as multiple watches freezing right at twelve noon on the day of the excursion and Miranda's admission that she "won't be here much longer" to her admirer, Sara (Margaret Nelson). But why did the loudly petulant Edith (Christine Schuler) scream and abandon her fellow girls? Moreover, why was the serious-minded Miss McGraw (Vivean Gray) spotted running up the mountain in nothing but her trousers? I doubt it had anything directly to do with young Michael Fitzhubert (Dominic Guard) or his companion Albert Crundall (John Jarratt), who ogled the girls as they went along the path, but Michael nonetheless seems oddly devoted to searching for them. And what about the eventual discovery of Irma and her missing corset? Was Miranda right when she quoted Poe who observed that "What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream"? As the school gardener points out rather more plainly, "there's some questions got answers and some haven't."
- Based on a story presented as though it were true, Picnic at Hanging Rock is a brilliant bit of suspenseful yet ambiguous filmmaking by director Peter Weir. The hazy cinematography, eerie panflute music, and disquieting ambient soundtrack (especially the mountain's constant low rumble), all work together to produce an atmosphere of inexplicable dread. One gets the impression that, thematically speaking, some of the tension is caused by the atmosphere of repressed sexuality on Valentine's Day at Appleyard College. Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts) herself, the film's other foreboding mountain, is more worried about whether her girls are "intact" than alive and appears to have substituted Miss McGraw for her late husband. Sara, meanwhile, is obviously in love with Miranda, which should hardly be an unanticipated development at a school where shared beds, mutual hair brushing, and corset lines are the norm. The film provides one final mystery as the narrator informs us that Mrs. Appleyard's body was also found at Hanging Rock just six weeks after the picnic. We can only concur with the film's final line, noting that "to this day their disappearance remains a mystery."
- Based on a novel by Joan Lindsay and, by most accounts, not based on a true story at all.
- From the dreamy dancing to the inexplicably missing (and reappearing) girls, it's tough to deny the influence on Twin Peaks.
