• Directed by Peter Weir, 1975

AN: this was originally posted on July 6, 2016, on my old blog.

On St. Valentine’s Day in the year 1900, during a sweltering Australian summer, the students at a girls’ school take a trip to a nearby rock formation called Hanging Rock. Though they are advised not to climb the ancient stones, four of the girls go off and anyway. Only one of them comes back. The rest have disappeared. Picnic at Hanging Rock deals with this event and with its aftermath, as the void the girls left behind expands and threatens to swallow their small community whole. Picnic builds a suffocating atmosphere out of the repressive morals of the time. Peter Weir’s direction and Russell Boyd’s cinematography create a dangerous, dreamlike world that resembles a fairy tale.

Class is a central point of the story. The wealthy people in the film are so buttoned up and repressed they can barely speak to each other. The only person Michael can speak to honestly throughout the film is Albert. The servants, on the other hand, are significantly more open. And sexual repression is key to this. As Michael and Albert watch the schoolgirls cross the creek, Albert makes some comments about their bodies. Michael admonishes him, to which Albert says, “I say the crude things; you just think them.” Servants in this film are allowed freedom of expression that the rich have to deny themselves for fear of looking “uncouth”. But there is no intrinsic difference between the two groups. They just play by different rules.

The girls, at least, are allowed a break from this emotional repression through their passionate romantic friendships for each other, which were commonplace at the time. The film takes place on Valentine’s Day and opens with the girls reading cards full of flowery poetry that they have sent each other. Being around each other all the time with no boys for miles, they turn their burgeoning attentions to each other. Most of the friendships seem platonic- except for that of Sarah and Miranda. Before she disappears, Miranda warns Sarah that she had better “learn to love someone else, apart from me . . . I won’t be here much longer.” Sarah’s love is mostly subtext but adds another layer to the way these girls are repressed and kept from free expression.

After Edith comes back and is seen by a doctor, Headmistress Appleyard asks if she had been raped. The doctor says no- he checked, and she is “intact”. This deeply unsettling choice of wording reinforces the idea that these girls are nothing more than potential wives- not people in their own right. It’s possible to read Appleyard’s question as concern, but her extreme pragmatism later on (being more concerned about the image of the school than the disappeared girls, her kicking Sarah out) leads one to believe that she is more concerned that Edith will be unmarriageable, and thus a failure on Mrs. Appleyard’s part, if she is not “intact”. Wealthy girls like Edith are going to be married to wealthy men, who expect their brides to be virgins. Here class intersects with sexism, tying together the two main themes of the film.

These themes are further developed through the use of recurring motifs such as flowers, reflections, and clothing. When Irma is returned, she is sent to a nearby home to convalesce. One of the maids there discovers that her corset is missing. All her other clothes were there, but not her corset. This connects to the disappearance of Mrs. McCraw, who was seen running through the woods skirtless. Skirts, corsets, boots- all the things that tie and tighten up these girls disappear. They are set free.

Reflections and mirrors also play a significant part. Miranda and Irma, who both later go missing, are seen in reflections during the opening sequence.

The reflections serve a dual purpose: creating distance between the viewer and the girls in the mirrors (as we are not allowed to look at them head-on) and reinforcing the themes of femininity. Girls in 1900 were treated like pretty objects instead of people. When the girls are close to freedom, away from school and society’s rules, we finally get to see them head-on instead of reflected.

But again, when they turn their backs on Edith, turning their back on the repressive and suffocating world they know, we don’t see their faces.

Flowers, and nature as a whole, are also a recurring image. Throughout the film, Hanging Rock and the surrounding woods are saturated with mysticism. The forest is traditionally symbolic of a break from civilization. Nature is not governed by societal rules, so in stories, things happen there that wouldn’t happen in the city. Like girls disappearing into the air. Picnic takes this symbolism and uses it as further contrast between the Australian wilds and good proper England. When being interviewed by a police constable, Michael says, “In England young ladies like that wouldn’t be allowed to go walking in the forest. Not alone anyway.” But things are different in Australia. It’s interesting that the movie that was foundational in creating an Australian film identity is about, symbolically at least, establishing an Australian national identity.

In 1900, Australia was not yet the nation we know today. The six disparate British colonies on the Australian continent would not unite until the following year. Yet Australia had already been developing its sense of individuality as a nation. This was not just another British outpost. The environment forced its inhabitants to become something other than that. In Picnic, the untamed Australian landscape is reflected in the characters, who chafe against proper British upbringing. An exterior shot of Appleyard School shows that it is a typical building done in the British style- surrounded by a thoroughly unBritish landscape and bright blue sky. In every way, this film is about freedom- from oppression, from rules, from the Queen.

Yet freedom is a limited resource. When Miranda, Marion and Mrs. McCraw are set free, everything else collapses. Many teachers, servants and students leave the school. Due to financial pressures and frustration, Headmistress Appleyard kicks Sarah out. Irma leaves for Europe, but before she goes, the other girls scream at her, demanding answers she cannot provide. Sarah commits suicide by falling out her bedroom window. Afterwards, as we learn during a voiceover at the end of the film, Mrs. Appleyard’s body was found at the base of Hanging Rock. Whether she committed suicide or merely fell off while looking for answers, it is never made certain. So many questions in the film are left unanswered. But the central question is not “Where did the girls go?”, it is “What happens when the girls go?” And the movie tells us in great and sometimes horrifying detail.

In Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca, the protagonist at one point says, “If only there could be an invention that bottled up memory, like scent . . . when one wanted, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.” Picnic at Hanging Rock has bottled up the memory of turn-of-the-century Australia, distilling the mood of the time into this film. Its beautiful cinematography and direction, and willingness to leave some things unstated and unanswered, makes it uniquely compelling.