Unsolved mysteries II The puzzle of Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, Directed by Peter Weir. Written by Cliff Green, from the novel by Joan Lindsay. With Rachel Roberts, Helen Morse, Anne Lambert, Margaret Nelson, Karen Robson, Jane Vallis, Christine Schuler, Vivean Gray, Jacki Weaver, Dominic Guard, and John Jarrett. At the Brattle Theatre this Friday through Sunday, June 26 through 28.

The X-Files isn't the only long-running unsolved mystery in town this week. Picnic at Hanging Rock, the Australian puzzler from Peter Weir (The Truman Show), has been hanging around since 1975 without getting any closer to a solution. The video has been out of the catalogue for some time; now Picnic is coming to the Brattle in a freshly struck director's cut that's seven minutes shorter -- yes, shorter -- than the original release. Maybe Weir felt he'd given away too much information.

He states the film's premise right there on the opening title: "On Saturday 14th February 1900 a party of schoolgirls from Appleyard College picnicked at Hanging Rock, near Mt. Macedon in the state of Victoria. During the afternoon several members of the party disappeared without trace . . ." So we know what's going to happen; the question is who, why, and will anyone be able to find them. Weir provides an abundance of clues, but (as he's well aware) they're like pieces from different jigsaw puzzles: nothing quite fits together. Picnic at Hanging Rock is also a detective story without a detective, so some obvious inquiries never get made. Even that opening statement is a bit of a crock: it suggests these events actually took place, when in fact the movie is based on a novel by Joan Lindsay. And Weir has, unfortunately, an agenda, which includes bashing Victorian sexual repression and bowing at the feet of the great god Pan. But if you ignore the message and the mystical mumbo-jumbo, you'll find a mystery that's as magical as it is moving.

The film opens on the morning of St. Valentine's Day, with the Pre-Raphaelite young ladies of Appleyard College reading Victorian Valentine verse while struggling into their corsets and white lace and black stockings in preparation for the day's outing. For all that Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts, superbly complex) appears to run the school with an iron hand, her charges are bursting with bloom and almost innocent joy, and never mind if there are no young men about. Indeed, we hear blonde Miranda (an iconic Anne Lambert) telling dark-haired Sara (Margaret Nelson), "Someday you must come with me to Queensland and meet my sweet, funny family." But just a moment later, this from Miranda: "You must try to love someone else, apart from me. I won't be here much longer." See, puzzle pieces that don't match. Sara is excluded from the outing, apparently because she failed to memorize "The Wreck of the Hesperus"; but neither Miranda nor any of the other girls takes notice -- they're too busy admiring the ring (left hand, fourth finger) that's being shown off by their French teacher, Mademoiselle de Poitiers (Helen Morse), who seems to be in love with them all.

Our heroines are dispatched to Hanging Rock, which is a million years old, and volcanic. After lunch, Miranda, Irma (Karen Robson), and Marion (Jane Vallis) propose "to make some geological measurements at the base of the rock," reluctantly allowing the dumpy Edith (Christine Schuler) to join them. Miranda promises Mademoiselle they'll be back for tea -- then waves goodbye as if it were farewell. Mademoiselle, looking at a reproduction of Botticelli's Birth of Venus, tells pinch-faced spinster governess Miss McCraw (Vivean Gray) that Miranda reminds her of a Botticelli angel when it's really Venus she has in mind. The girls climb higher and higher, through the phallic forms; Miranda, Irma, and Marion remove their shoes and stockings. Finally the three beautiful ones disappear silently into a narrow opening, as if summoned by a higher power, while Edith looks on in horror, then flees back down the hill. The party returns to the college minus not only the three girls but also Miss McCraw, who disappeared from the picnic area while everyone else was asleep.

This first half of the film rotates around Miranda, who has Mademoiselle, Sara, and most of the other girls spinning in her orbit; she's even caught the eye of Michael (Dominic Guard), the young nephew of Colonel and Mrs. Fitzhubert (whoever they are), and Albert (John Jarrett), the Fitzhubert coachman. This sets up a number of interesting possibilities that Weir chooses to puncture. Mrs. Appleyard and Sara are back at the college, eliminated by logistics. We know nothing about Irma and Marion, so they're not likely to be involved. Michael had followed the girls a little way -- only a little way, he says -- and he seems evasive in his answers to the police. Yet it's he and Albert who persist in the search, and Albert who, a week after the disappearance, finds Irma alive (and, conveniently, with no memory of the affair). After that the two men recede into the background. Of course there was never any real question of abduction or accident. Miranda's premonition, her subsequent observation that "everything begins, and ends, at exactly the right time and place," the way the girls strip off their stockings and who knows what else (Irma is found fully clothed, and "intact," but without her corset; Edith recalls seeing Miss McCraw without her skirt), the way they're drawn trancelike up into the rock, the persistent pan-fluting of Zamfir on the soundtrack -- Weir makes it clear that the four women experience some sort of sexual epiphany. But it's still a mystery: he doesn't tell us whether they're visited by a divine principle (male? female? something else?) or keep it among themselves, and we never learn why Irma alone is found, whether the other three are still up on Hanging Rock or have moved on to another (higher?) plane of existence.

We get no answers in Picnic's second half, only "clues" that are both tantalizing and irritating. Edith, Michael, and Irma are all found badly scratched and with bruises on their heads; yet Irma's bare feet are unmarked. Irma sets off a near riot when she returns to the college to say goodbye before joining her parents in Europe: in her red cloak and feathered hat, looking as if she'd stepped out of a Henry James novel, she displays a sexual maturity that infuriates her former schoolmates. Michael "remembers" Miranda looking impudently, invitingly at him just before she disappeared (but was she really looking at him?), and he keeps "seeing" her as a swan. Sara, we learn, has a little porcelain swan next to her portrait of Miranda. Is Miranda indeed swimming about the college grounds?

Toward the end the focus shifts to Sara, and the puzzles proliferate. Sara has a brother named Albert; Albert has a sister named Sara. Mrs. Appleyard tells Mademoiselle that Sara's guardian has taken her away when nothing of the sort has happened. And Mrs. Appleyard is already wearing black when she's told what's been found in the greenhouse. These enigmas lead to a couple of last-minute shockers, but it all resolves into banal moralizing. Weir's triumph is back at Hanging Rock. And it's registered on the soundtrack, where the all-too-obvious gives way to the ineffable sublime, Zamfir being replaced by the slow movement from Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. Weir ends his film with a slow-motion flashback to the picnic group, just before the girls leave: as his camera pans from right to left, the faces and the music tell us what words can't. Miranda waves farewell once more, and as she turns and that cornsilk hair swirls for the last time, we're confronted with a beauty for which there's no explanation, a mystery that has no solution.

by Jeffrey Gantz


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