Film: “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (1975) directed by Peter Weir
Some 1970s classics just don’t age well. Like Chia pets and Huckapoo shirts. And songs like “Disco Duck.”
But then there are those classics that do endure, like Peter Weir’s 1975 film “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (IFC.) It’s hardly the milestone some critics claim, but if you compare it to current junk like “Doghead,” AND you grade on a curve, it’s fairly impressive after all.
The setting is a girls’ school in Victoria, Australia in the late 1890s. It’s Valentine’s Day, and the school's Cruella de Ville headmistress (Rachel Roberts) has decided to treat the students to a field trip and a picnic at an unusual but scenic volcanic formation called Hanging Rock.
Despite strict rules from the headmistress about not climbing the rock, Miranda, the prettiest student (Anne-Louise Lambert) and three other girls venture off anyway. Up and up they climb, then proceed seemingly in a trance into a hidden crevice.
It's not until the end of the day that the headmistress realizes the three girls, plus one of the teachers (Vivean Gray), have disappeared. This sends the townspeople into a frenzy, and they question everybody who may have seen the children that day. These include a young Englishman, Michael Fitzhubert (Dominic Guard) and his Australian friend, Albert (John Jarrett), who did see them pass but didn’t follow them.
Guilt-ridden, Michael takes matters into his own hands and searches the trails after the police have given up. He stays up at the Rock overnight and finds Irma alive inside a crevice the next day, but she has no memory of her disappearance and cannot say what happened to Miranda or the other girls.
The disappearances cause a scandal, leading to parents pulling their daughters out of the school and screaming headlines over the world.
So what happened? Some have theorized that the crevice in the rock represented an entry into another dimension. Or did the girls simply run away when nobody was looking?
After viewing “Hanging Rock” in 1975, one American distributor threw his coffee cup against the screen because he'd wasted two hours of his life—“a mystery without a goddamn ending!”
Weir, and director of cinematography Russell Boyd, were inspired by the work of British photographer and film director David Hamilton, who had draped different types of veils over his camera lens to produce diffused and soft-focus images.
This adds in some gorgeous scenics of the Australian outback, but much of the slo-mo camera work focuses on young pretty blondes tossing their hair and writing love poems to one other. Seems like a cross between 1970s soft porn and a shampoo commercial.
Weir went on to direct less ethereal movies in the years that followed, including “The Year of Living Dangerously,” “Gallipoli” and “The Truman Show.” But he faded from the spotlight in 2010, which to us moviegoers was a disappearance as mysterious and frustrating as the ending in “Hanging Rock.”
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