#89: Picnic at Hanging Rock
More questions than answers in a tale of disappearance
This review was originally posted to Twitter on April 25, 2019.
Initial release: August 8, 1975
Director: Peter Weir
When global northerners talk about Australian film, they almost exclusively mean Mad Max. It’s a shame, because Australia has plenty to offer in the cinema; for example, this strange, surreal mystery about disappeared schoolgirls.
It’s Valentine’s Day, in the year 1900, and the students of a boarding school for girls in Victoria, Australia, go on a picnic at Hanging Rock, a local pile of million-year-old igneous rock. The rock is dangerous to climb on, but that doesn’t deter a few of the girls from trying. Not long after, one girl returns to the school screaming that the others are gone — just gone, along with one of the teachers. The disappearance sends ripples through the school and surrounding community, and the rest of the film focuses on their struggles to come to grips with the incident.
In that sense, it’s much like Twin Peaks, especially given the surreal, dreamlike vibe to much of it, sometimes descending into psychological horror. The story deftly weaves several character arcs together, yet nothing feels unfinished… even though the mystery is never solved.
It’s hard to really describe my feelings watching this film; it’s beautifully shot, the Australian bush a bright, yet isolated backdrop amidst all the period costumes and haunting soundtrack, but it’s a film that thrives on ambiguity and repressed sexuality. Credit must be given to Rachel Roberts, as the uncompromising, authoritarian headmistress of the school, and the way she slowly starts to come unglued as the disappearance remains in the news and parents pull their kids from the school. The first time you see her, right away you can see how much of an authoritarian she is — she’s got the stocky build and enormous hairdo of the archetypal Trunchbull, but as the film wears on, her alcoholism becomes more apparent and that impeccable bun starts to come unraveled. She’s a clear subversion of the tough, unreasonable headmistress, in that she does seem to care about her students, but there’s always an underlying vibe that the school is all about making proper English ladies at a time when Australia was developing its own national identity.
One could argue that none of this matters to the core mystery of what the hell happened to those missing girls, but the fact that the mystery is never solved would seem to argue against that. Like the gardener says at one point, “there’s some questions got answers and some haven’t.” That’s kind of the big point of the film: amidst all the subtext about what the school represents and youthful rebellion and all that is the lesson that some things will never be solved, we’ll never know the answer to — and sometimes knowing the answer ruins the mystery.
