Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) - What do we think about it? Brief review.

WHAT WE THINK:

OUR SCORE:

– A mysterious, dreamlike and ancestral film.

JUST A FEW WORDS (IN THE HEAT OF THE MOMENT):

Picnic at Hanging Rock is a 1975 film by director Peter Weir. It is a powerful and evocative film, clearly influenced by the pictorial impressionism, by the cinema of Ingmar Bergman and by the raids of the “new German cinema”, especially in the dynamics of the works of Werner Herzog.

Among the various ways (widely traceable by doing a simple internet research) of analyzing this film, Picnic at Hanging Rock could also be read as the story of Sarah and her final act. A film based on absence: that of the girls who disappear, but also of Sarah herself from the picnic.

Dense with symbolism and sexual character subtexts, Picnic at Hanging Rock speaks of Time, Nature, the Human Being, the mystery of life and death, the dream, the disappearance, the freedom and the seclusion and does so by emphasizing the revolutionary social effect that these themes bring within a “closed” society like the one depicted by the film; it is perhaps in some of these traits that we can note a certain fascination of the director for the cinema of Luis Buñuel.

The film opens on the words “What we see or what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream” whose echo reaches another visionary director such as David Lynch, especially in regards of his TV-Series Twin Peaks. After all, Miranda, Marion and Irma should not be in a place that far from where Laura Palmer is.

PROS:

The atmosphere.
The mysterious character and symbolism.

CONS:

Unfortunately, the film has aged quite badly from a visual standpoint, with an apparatus of techniques fully ingrained in the era in which it was shot and which we are not so passionate about.

What do you think of this film? Please leave a comment below and let us know!

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GENERAL INFO:

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) Drama, Mystery | 115min | 2 February 1979 (USA)

7.5

Director: Peter WeirWriter: Joan Lindsay, Cliff GreenStars: Rachel Roberts, Anne-Louise Lambert, Vivean GraySummary: Three students and a school teacher disappear on an excursion to Hanging Rock, in Victoria, on Valentine's Day, 1900. The movie follows those that disappeared, and those that stayed behind, but it delights in the asking of questions, not the answering of them. Even though both the movie and the book it was based on claim to be inspired by real events, the story is completely fictional. Written by David Carroll <davidc@atom.ansto.gov.au>