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Picnic At Hanging Rock
on DVD (1975)
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Brief synopsis of Picnic At Hanging Rock
Situated somewhere between supernatural horror and lush Victorian melodrama, director Peter Weir's lyrical, enigmatic masterpiece is an imaginative tease. The setting is a proper turn-of-the century Australian boarding school for girls, a suffocating institution built on strict moral codes, repressed sexuality, and a subtle but enforced class structure. As the film opens, girls draped in immaculate white dress prepare for a picnic at the nearby volcanic formation, Hanging Rock, and Weir hangs an air of dark foreboding over the proceeding. "You'll have to love someone else, because I won't be here very long," says one virginal girl, Miranda, to her friend. Her words are prophetic: during the picnic, Miranda, along with two other girls and an uptight schoolmistress, vanish into the rocks. While a search party repeatedly returns to the rock to look for either the girls or the reasons for their disappearance, Weir leaves the mystery unsolved. Like Antonioni's L'Avventura, the vanishing is open to numerous interpretations--both rational and illusory--but Weir drops enough allegorical clues that it feels like a parable. He transforms the landscape and weather into menacing and eerie images; outlines of faces can be seen in the rocks, while the oppressive heat beating down on the picnic doubles as an atmospheric metaphor for the girls' unbearable social and sexual confinement. These images and other plot twists toward the end hint that this mysterious vanishing, on some level, was actually a form of spiritual escape--the only out, other than death, from the film's bleak, tightly structured community. Regardless of how you see it, though, this hypnotic puzzle remains the highlight of the '70s Australian New Wave. --Dave McCoy
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All DVDs in this series
Picnic At Hanging Rock - The Director's Cut
Situated somewhere between supernatural horror and lush Victorian melodrama, director Peter Weir's lyrical, en...
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Picnic At Hanging Rock - The Original Version
THE ORIGINAL VERSION - The longer version has been restored to the best possible standard using limited availa...
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Picnic At Hanging Rock - Bonus Features
Bonus Features Include:
Features Director's Cut and the much in demand longer Original Version (currently una...
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Related
Critics Reviews
Radio Times
On St Valentine's Day in 1900 a party of schoolgirls enjoys a day at Hanging Rock, a local beauty spot. But something odd is at work: clocks stop at midday and three girls vanish. Dingo dogs, extraterrestrials, kidnappers or what? In this psychological take on the mystery, director Peter Weir leaves clues hanging in the air like a glistening spider's web, hears celestial choirs and thrumming insects — he hasn't the foggiest, but he adores ambiguity, mysticism and metaphor. It's a very sexy picture, which stares an enigma straight in the eye and, in the process, proved to the world that the new Australian cinema was capable of making films other than those that featured gnarled and drunken sheep-shearers. There are fine performances from Rachel Roberts, Helen Morse and Dominic Guard, which, with the outstanding location work, add up to a decidedly class act.
Halliwell's Film Guide
A film that ventures successfully into the mystic and bravely offers no answer to its central puzzle, just a question that continues to haunt the mind. Whether you want to regard it as a parable of sexual awakening or of colonial repression, it successful
Entertainment Weekly
"...[It] wears the brilliant obscurity of a Dickinson poem and the suggestive force of a Magritte painting....[Offers] just the perfect beauty of its puzzle..." -- Rating: A
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