Unsolved mysteries II
The puzzle of Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock
by Jeffrey Gantz
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.