Picnic at Hanging Rock is one of those rare films which becomes more inexplicable when seen repeatedly. Weir directed this adaptation of the Joan Lindsay novel prior to The Last Wave, a film equally interested in Australia as a land remaining wholly other and inaccessible to its white settlers. Lindsay’s novel was scandalously ambiguous about the facts of this story about a few private school girls and their teacher vanishing during an outing to a rock formation in southeast Australia.
Likewise, the film is shot and scored with perilous beauty, the scenes around Hanging Rock hovering between dream and reality. The search for these girls and reaction of the town and school to the disappearance begins to reveal an elusive set of reflections on nature, innocence, and Victorian sexuality. It is not quite clear what we are waking up to in the film, though we find ourselves drawn into Weir’s deeply poetic handle on nature as an enduring stage for the mysteries and conflicts of modernity.
—Michael Leary
- Directed by: Peter Weir
- Produced by: Hal McElroy Jim McElroy A. John Graves Patricia Lovell
- Written by: Joan Lindsay Cliff Green
- Music by:
- Cinematography by: Russell Boyd
- Editing by: Max Lemon
- Release Date: 1975
- Running Time: 115
- Language: English
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2017 Top 25 Films on Waking Up— #16