Rainy days have that quality that they force you to stay home and push you to watch the movies which have been sitting idle on hour hardrives for weeks, months, year (select yourself your usual range of cinephilic procrastination) and that's why this weekend I chose to watch that quintessential Australian movie from 1975 called PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK by Peter Weir.
PICNIC AT HANGING is the second film in the long and fruiful career of Peter Weir - arguably the most successful Australian director after George Miller (Mel Gibson being a special case) and the one which made him almost instantly, let's not say "famous" because Weir is a far cry from a genius and would laugh off the notion himself, but recognizable as a reliable hand for big studios.
The movie is adapted from a novel by the Australian artist Joan Lindsay published in 1967 which has fascinated Australians readers ever since its publication.
The story happens in Australia at the beginning of the XXth century and focuses on the young girls from a Victorian college for young ladies which go for a picnic at Saint Valentine's day to the local beauty spot: Hanging Rock.
The day is hot, the young girls are even permitted to remove their gloves, and 4 of the most audacious ones start climbing the rock in spite of the warnings of the teachers. Only one of them will come down the rock, and even a teacher disappears.
The disappearance of the young girls covers in itself one fourth of the movie and is by far the most atmospheric and strange part of the movie in itself. This is where the movie can deliberately be assigned to the fantastic genre. Have they been abducted? By surpernatural force? Have they stumbled into a portal to another dimension? We are led to believe that the rock has some kind of supernatural force very early when all the clocks of the party of schoolgirls stop at precisely 12.
Peter Weir uses to great effect a great close-up of the ants devouring the crumbs of the Saint Valentine cake to create unease in the viewer, which will be paralleled by the words of one of the schoolgirl, up on the rock, comparing her friends asleep at the bottom of the rock to "ants".
The disappearance of the girls in itself is treated very casually, without big effects, which makes it all the more chilling and haunting.
The remainder of the movie covers the attempts by the authorities to find the girls and the teacher in and around the rock and to understand what happened.
However, the authorities are not the only ones who become obsessed with the disappearance, some witnesses like the young Michael Fitzhubert can't forget the case and will do everything in his power to find them - raked by guilt and probably by an acute case of impossible love for Miranda, the ethereal leading girl of the missing party who seems to have been metamorphosed into a swan in the young man's imagination.
But let's just say that there is not going to be any scientific explanation to the phenomenom and it's not really the point anyway: the point is that the original book was published in 1967. It is definitely a brainchild of the 60s: all those pretty little girls are safely rounded up like cattle in a big dull and corseted Victorian institution. They have dreams, aspirations and hopes which are carefully trimmed and culled by the experts hands of Mrs. Appleyard.
It feels like the Hanging Rock shatters all these restraints and just welcome the missing girls into a new world where they are free of those chains, wild and terrifying as may be that new world, a world which is as old as the lava which has created Hanging Rock. The sexual tension is palpable in the disappearance scene and also in its aftermath: the one and only thing the authorities and medical profession seem to care is if the girls are "untouched." However, it also conveys very efficiently an idea of the end of a period of a woman's life. These girls are still children but are obviously in thralls with their own budding sexuality, and this disappearance may the simple metaphor of the abandonment of the childhood games and innocence and the passing into a new world.
In comparison with the mastery of the disappearance in itself, the rest of the movie feels a bit slow and rigid. As much as you know that you will not get any satisfying answer, you still hope you'll be provided with some clues but nothing ever comes out of it and that's something which has bugged the movie ever since.
One last word about Peter Weir: even though he has this reputation as a man for hire, he does not sell off and shoots only the scripts and stories which appeal to him for personal reasons. I think he is the closest filmmaker Australia has to a John Boorman for example in the United Kingdom. He belongs to that type of old filmmakers capable of tackling any climate, any story, any genre, any theme with equal success. Most important of all, he belongs to that time and place where directors learned to be and also has that enviable quality of never showing off and rather to always put the camera at the service of the story and the actors - which he succeeded rather well with Picnic at Hanging Rock.