Peter Weir makes a school outing frightening without taking away the sunshine. The girls are sometimes too idealised, but the patient cutting and Russell Boyd’s photography make this a mystery we recommend warmly.
Picnic at Hanging Rock is a deeply unsettling mystery, worth the patience it asks of us. Peter Weir takes a school outing on St Valentine’s Day in 1900 and makes the daylight feel unsafe. The disappearance matters, but the picnic is troubling before we have much reason to fear for anyone. The film makes the girls’ escape from school restrictions feel precarious, and its unease survives the immediate question of what has happened to them.
Cliff Green’s screenplay, adapted from Joan Lindsay’s novel, gives the school’s insistence on propriety a weight of its own. Rachel Roberts plays Mrs. Appleyard with a severity that makes such authority credible, even when its confidence seems absurd. Her seriousness is frightening because she seems to believe that keeping order ought to be enough to keep trouble away. The picnic places the girls somewhere that cannot be made safe by prescribing the correct behaviour.
Russell Boyd’s cinematography is central to the discomfort. The sunlight does not let us inspect the landscape and put our fears to rest; it makes the place feel stranger, as though looking harder might be a mistake. Against the rock, the schoolgirls seem exposed in a way that the school’s manners cannot address. We were frightened by the rock in broad daylight, because Boyd makes its physical presence so much more forceful than the people beside it.
Max Lemon’s editing allows that uncertainty to settle instead of hurrying us towards the next piece of information. The pace can feel languid, but it gives us time to start distrusting the landscape, which justifies spending so long looking at it. Bruce Smeaton’s music sustains the unease beneath that leisurely pace, rather than supplying an instruction to jump. The effect is hypnotic, though anyone unmoved by the images may reasonably find the extended attention to them rather slow.
The reservation is the treatment of the girls themselves. Anne-Louise Lambert gives Miranda St. Clare a calm that suits the film’s fascination with her, but the camera’s attention sometimes makes her seem too perfect. We wanted a little more of the irritation and awkwardness that might interrupt all that admiration. A film so alert to the restrictions placed on young women can still spend too long looking at them as though their chief duty were to be beautiful.
Many mysteries encourage us to feel clever for noticing what other people miss. This one makes sustained attention uncomfortable: studying the rock does little to make it seem familiar or safe. The tension between Victorian manners and the Australian landscape gives that discomfort a social cause, without requiring us to translate every image into a statement about repression. Peter Weir trusts that an audience can be interested in the girls’ desires and frightened for them at the same time.
Watch it when there is time to settle into its pace, rather than with one eye on the clock. The 107 minutes ask for attention, particularly when there seems to be little happening. We would leave the conversation until afterwards.
