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The Criterion Channel Presents: Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)


It’s rare to see a movie so entrancing, compelling, and different that you know it will be with you for weeks. Picnic at Hanging Rock is one of the best of those kind of movies, a product of the Australian New Wave that arguably began four years prior with Nicolas Roeg’s masterful Walkabout, and perhaps is its’ most acclaimed. Based on the novel by Joan Lindsay and directed by Peter Weir, who would go on to have an eclectic yet impressive career directing movies such as Gallipoli, Witness, Dead Poets’ Society, The Truman Show, and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, it’s a story concerning the disappearance of three schoolgirls and their teacher during a picnic to Hanging Rock in Victoria, Australia in 1900. Like Fargo, the film misleads you into thinking it’s based on true events, though takes it a step further through incorporating actual dates and specific locations that adds to its seeming authenticity. In the end it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s true, the mystery is as captivating as any unsolved murder case.
Weir perhaps doesn’t get enough credit for his skills as a visual storyteller, which he demonstrates exceptionally well here. Through the silent, almost slow-motion editing in places to the eerie superimposed imagery, to compositional choices in how the girls are shot during their hike up the mountain and the inconsistent labyrinthine geography therein that keeps you uneasy, the film relates a beautiful, haunting atmosphere, made more so by the foreboding musical choices: a series of panpipe motifs and organic accompaniment from Romanian musician Gheorghe Zamfir and samplings of classical cues from Beethoven and Bach. All of it adds up to give the film a gothic mood and to evoke the ancient, dangerous, and enigmatic nature of this world in contrast to its recent settlers out of place in its environment. The film is one of the creepiest I’ve seen in a while, reminiscent of The Haunting in its’ subtleties, and the scene where the three girls, as though hypnotized, slowly disappear into a crevice, ignoring the cries of their companion, is one of spookiest movie moments I may have ever seen.
But all this is really only part of the movie, most of its narrative following the fallout of the disappearances. As Vincent Canby observed, it is “a movie composed almost entirely of clues”, but no answers. One girl Sara (Margaret Nelson) who is particularly close to the leader Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert) seems to know more than she lets on. Why did the girls venture so far? Why was Miranda constantly regaling them with poetry and existential musings as if permanently in a daze? Was there a sexual factor at work, the teacher being witnessed climbing the rock in search of them without her skirt. When one of the girls, Irma (Karen Robson) is recovered with amnesia, why wasn’t she wearing her corset? In the midst of all this, we see the public response, a boy enamoured by Miranda desperately searching for her, the school’s reputation plummeting, and its headmistress (a stony Rachel Roberts) making drastic decisions. The ambiguity the film leaves you with is in some ways akin to L’Avventura, though far more interested in its mystery than Antonioni ever was. By the time you realize no resolution is coming, it’s too late. You’re hooked, and forced to let your imagination sort out the mesmerizing puzzle of that fateful picnic at Hanging Rock.

Criterion Recommendation: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
It’s Oscar month, so it’s a good time to add one of the very first Oscar winners to the collection. There may have never been another Unique and Artistic Award winner after F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, but then how many movies can really live up to it? The simple story of a Man (George O’Brien) conspiring with a Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston) to murder his Wife (Janet Gaynor) that turns into the gradual rekindling of that romance, it is a pastoral parable that somehow manages to be lovely and endearing despite its start in such an extreme place. Murnau’s signature expressionism shines through radiantly, Gaynor (who won an Oscar) is utterly exquisite, and the film truly lives up to its title in being one of the most humanistic works of art of the silent era if not cinema itself.

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