Picnic at Hanging Rock

Plot synopsis:
The film begins in a (fictional) English girls' school in the Australian bush on February 14, 1900. The school is headed by Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts), an indomitable and unbending figure of authority. Her staff include the remote mathematics mistress Miss Greta McCraw (Vivean Gray), said to have a 'masculine' intellect; the young and beautiful Mademoiselle de Portiers (Helen Morse) who teaches French and deportment, and the jittery Miss Lumley (Kirsty Child), who is anxious to please Mrs. Appleyard.Amid lingering images of white-clad girls in whispering voices delighting in Valentine's cards, the character of Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert) and her friend and admirer, Sara (Margaret Nelson) are introduced. Miranda's circle of friends includes Irma (Karen Robson), Marion (Jane Vallis), Rosamund (Ingrid Mason). Sara's affection for Miranda clearly stems from a deep romantic crush. Another pupil, Edith (Christine Schuler) hovers on the edge of Miranda's circle, desperate for acceptance. Sara, an orphan who is a kind of charity pupil, is disliked by Mrs. Appleyard, and is not allowed to join the outing, ostensibly because she has not memorized an assigned poem. Miranda shows worry that Sara dotes on her too much in which she tells Sara that she "won't be here much longer" (suggesting a premonition of her disappearance). The party leaves leaving behind Mrs. Appleyard and Sara.The girls ride to Hanging Rock, a 500-foot tall volcanic rock formation about 11 km northeast of the school. Mlle. de Portiers and Miss McCraw are the supervisors. Mr. Hussey drives the girls in his wagon on the trip to the formation. For some odd reason, everyone's timepiece and wristwatch stops at 12 noon when they arrive. Miranda cuts a cake in honor of St. Valentine and the party relaxes in the warm shade.Marion asks permission to take Miranda and Irma for an excursion on the rock and is accompanied by Edith. Their departure is witnessed by a fascinated young Englishman who attempts to follow them, but soon breaks away. After a brief nap (or swoon) on a plateau, they get up, and seemingly under a spell, three of them advance as one toward an inner recess, witnessed by Edith, who cries out to them not to go. She screams and runs downward. One of the teachers, Miss McCraw, leaves the picnic unnoticed and begins to climb the rock.Although the party was due back at about eight o'clock, it is 10:30 p.m. and after dark when Mr. Hussey's wagon arrives back at the school, where they tell Mrs. Appleyard about the mysterious disappearance. Edith remains hysterical and unable to explain what has transpired only that she saw Miss McCraw heading up toward the plateau without her skirt. The police investigation led by Sgt. Bumpher (Wyn Roberts) and Constable Jones (Garry McDonald) leads them to a young Englishman, Michael Fitzhubert (Dominic Guard) who was lunching at the rock with his family, his uncle Colonel Fitzhubert (Peter Collingwood) and Mrs. Fitzhubert (Olga Dickie). Michael, with Albert (John Jarratt), the Fitzhubert party's young local Australian valet, spent part of the lunch watching the picnic, but offer no clues in the investigation. Sara is devastated, but habitually treated coldly as the orphan she is by the teachers and students alike.The nearby town of Woodend quickly becomes restless as news of the disappearance spreads. The townsfolk are angry, demanding answers. Michael, who becomes obsessed with finding Miranda, gets Albert to accompany him to the Rock for another search after another search turned up nothing. The next morning, Albert travels up to the rock and finds a nearly delirious Michael whom he helps back down to the ground. Albert follows Michael's trail and discovers Irma, unconscious but unharmed.At the Fitzhubert home where Irma is treated for dehydration and exposure, she tells the police investigator that she has no memory of what happened on the rock, or of the fate of her companions. The servants note to themselves that her corset has gone missing.During a walk in the woods with Irma, Michael tells her that he's still obsessed with finding Miranda, but she still cannot remember anything about that day. Soon, both Albert and Michael begin to have terrible nightmares about a great evil that lurks at Hanging Rock. They continue to remain miserable over the three remaining disappearances.A kind of quiet mass hysteria consumes the school. Lessons seem to proceed with the usual tight order and control, but as the days pass and the missing women are not found, parents notify Mrs. Appleyard that they will be withdrawing their daughters from the school. During gym class, Irma stops by, dressed from head to foot in elegant red; her parents are taking her to Europe. The girls at first greet her with silence, then begin screaming frantically that she must tell them what happened, and physically attack her. Mlle. de Poitiers has to pull them off, and Irma runs away. Sara is discovered tied to the wall "to correct her posture". Miss Lumley gives notice that she is quitting.Mrs. Appleyard takes to drink and is more abusive than ever toward Sara, first telling her that her guardian has not paid her tuition and she must be sent to an institution, then lying to the remaining staff that Sara's guardian has taken her away overnight.The next morning, Sara's body is found in the greenhouse by Mr. Whitehead, the school's gardener. She apparently jumped or was pushed from her second floor bedroom window. When the gardener rushes into Mrs. Appleyard's office, she greets him with a calm stare; she is already dressed in full mourning with her things packed. Elsewhere, Albert tells Michael that he had a dream that his orphan sister came to see him in his dreams. Sara is revealed to be Albert's sister.Epilogue. A voice-over narrator details that after Sara's dead body was discovered, Mrs. Appleyard disappeared before the police could question her about the circumstances surrounding Sara's death. A few days later, Mrs. Appleyard's body was found beneath Hanging Rock -- apparently she went there and jumped off a ledge to her death. No one else was ever discovered there.

Tags: mystery, historical, boring, flashback

Review:
Much of the same thematic ground is covered, and the pronounced sense of uncertainty is a trademark of many Lynch films, especially his recent masterwork, "Mulholland Drive."Finally, what makes "Picnic At Hanging Rock" a true marvel of filmmaking is the complete integration of all elements in the support of the ephemeral theme.
Even though this has been described as a film about sexual repression (and Peter Weir may have thought he was making such a film), I don't think it is--rather, it is a celebration of the dreamy, self contained sexuality (or rather pre-sexuality) of young adolescent girls just before they seriously turn their attention to men.
The actress herself is affecting in her part and her boyish beauty contrasts well with Miranda's ethereal femininity (she looks like a young Renaissance prince at times), but her story really belongs in another movie because at heart "Picnic at Hanging Rock" is more Gothic than socially conscious.Maybe Weir really was aiming to make a movie about the evils of sexual repression, class inequality or even colonization, but such possible themes are blown away by the languid, ethereal images of the young adolescent girls at the beginning of the film, floating contentedly through their hours like clusters of Monet lilies..
Sara is shown pity by the housemaid, Minnie (Jacki Weaver), whose own sexuality is realised with the handyman, Tom (Tony Llewellyn-Jones), in stark contrast to the general ambience of repressed desire.Miranda's sentiment that  `Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place' is demonstrated by Joan Lindsay who based her fictional account on Hanging Rock, a sacred Aboriginal site, near Mount Macedon in Victoria.
Anne Louise Lambert's portrayal of Miranda (an ironic reincarnation from her famed role in 1973 as the bed-hopping nymphomaniac in the Australian soap `Number 96') captures the vision perfectly with her ethereal loveliness and enigmatic smile, and is reminiscent of the knowing look on the death mask of the renowned `L'Inconnue de la Seine', who coincidentally died around 1900 in Paris.Picnic at Hanging Rock is a masterpiece of its time, and still rates as one of my favourite films today..
It is this that is the crux for me; the appearance of something new from something so old; the old landscape, the passing values of Victorian society, the passing values of class deference in English-speaking societies, and obviously Australia.There is another thing that gets me about this movie; the down to earthness of Australians up against the bizarre and epic nature of an ancient landscape that refuses to be tamed.There is for me a sadness in this film, and repression of every kind, but, somewhere, in tiny glints throughout the movie, the future is glimpsed when ordinary people can be free of such repression, and somewhere the story of Oz itself is in this movie.
I have experienced it several times that people tend to expect "Picnic at Hanging Rock" to unfold like a detective story, while it is not one, in any respect.
In 'Picnic...' the wind moves plangently through eucalypts, clocks tick, an orphan girl is the victim of snobbish behaviour, girls gossip, more clocks tick, the wind moves through more eucalypts, the clocks stop, something 'unspeakably eerie' happens, and that's pretty much it.Ultimately, the film is about Peter Weir placing markers of European culture - corsets, watches, a locally built replica of an Eighteenth century English manor - in the vast, contoured, deeply ambivalent Australian hinterland, and letting his camera record the absurdity of those spatial relationships.
Picnic at Hanging Rock is a masterpiece of psychological fiction in which we see an awful thing happen from a great distance and are only given enough clues to guess at what happened to the missing girls.
I did not find the movie suspenseful or scary and I'm not sure why anybody would, although some people seem to.Roger Ebert and Peter Weir (both people who liked this film) sum it up nicely.Ebert describes it as a film that is "free of plot" That it is a film that doesn't have any final explanation and exists only as an "experience"Weir says that he worked very hard to have the audience lose awareness of the facts.
I should have read Ebert and Weirs' comments prior to watching the film and I'd realize that there is no plot and that the director didn't want you to even think for one moment that there was the possibility of an answer.
silicious lava forced up from deep below"), I can't shake off the impression that she's talking about the formation of something other than rocks, that it has nothing to do with the rock itself but something antediluvian and portentous like the 'evil came into the world' story narrated to Laura Dern by the old lady in Inland Empire.The mystery of the disappearance of the two girls and their teacher is never allowed to be drawn to the arena of the conscious mind to be subjected there to the laws of reason.
With theories springing up among the townfolks to explain it (a lot of them indicating violence, suggesting rape, or worse), we can see the formation of taboo in society out of pure unblemished innocence.What I like most about it though is the mythical symbolism Weir uses in painting a picture of pure innocence (the girls reciting poems of love in their dorm and getting ready for the picnic) before sending it off to an ethereal otherworldly doom.
In Peter Weir's film, "Picnic at Hanging Rock", a party of upper class schoolgirls and their teacher go missing.
But when everything about the missing girls (not just their disappearance) is left beautiful and mysterious, a hole inevitably opens up in the middle of the film.
The premise sounded promising: schoolgirls disappearing in the Outback at the site of sinister rock...I've sat through--and liked--most of the Merchant-Ivory films, been a fan of David Lean for years, so my attention span is pretty tolerant, however...endless shots of rocks & foliage (no matter how beautifully photographed), assorted creepy-crawlies, an ominous soundtrack and lots of drawn-out pauses do not constitute a film.I was looking forward to watching this film (I rented the "director's cut" on video), having heard much about it over the years, but I was left feeling like I'd attended a beautiful banquet in which most of the food turns out to be props.
In addition to the lack of substance, the film is marred by stagy moments such as "Mademoiselle" staring after Miranda (one of the schoolgirls) and comparing her to a Botticelli angel; another schoolgirl looking down on her companions from above and commenting (while staring off into the distance in the manner long ago deemed appropriate for a Soliloquy) on the insignificance of humans; scenes with characters who lend nothing to the plot or atmosphere (the servant couple at the school, for example) and very bad wigs (Rachel Roberts' in particular).I didn't find any of the "horror" promised and most of the suspense I experienced came from wondering when SOMETHING was going to happen.
On Valentine's Day in 1900, students of an all-girls college in Victoria, Australia, embark on an excursion to Hanging Rock, where they picnic and just generally appreciate the beauty of the surroundings and the geological marvel of the rock formations.
Unfortunately, some of the students disappear in truly bizarre circumstances.Early feature from Peter Weir (Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show) is a story often subtly told, and this enhances the sense of mystery regarding the disappearance of the girls, a mystery that appears to be at least as deeply buried as the now "hanging" rocks themselves were prior to being spewed out of the earth one-million years ago.The period setting and often beautiful locations add greatly to the overall effect.
Here we have a dreamlike exercise that weaves a tale of Victorian schoolgirls, circa 1900, who disappear after a school picnic on a sunny day near Hanging Rock.That's the story in a nutshell.
Before they disappear without explanation, we see the girls leading rather repressed lives without really getting to know any of them.The disappearance is something the whole story seems to be building toward, because there's an air of dread and mystery about Hanging Rock that makes the viewer feel the conclusion will reveal something--but it never does.
Most people remember Peter Weir's "Picnic at Hanging Rock" for for its almost horrific plot: an all-girl's school in Australia goes on a picnic on Valentine's Day, 1900, and all but one girl disappear without a trace.
Picnic at Hanging Rock feels like one of those films you need to watch repeatedly for some of the nuances or "clues" to sink in, but in reality a lack of resolution to the story IS the story.
Picnic at hanging Rock opens on the serenity and excitement of Appleyard College, an all-girls school on St Valentine's day in 1900.
The film is based on the true story of four girls who break away from the titles picnic group to take a closer look at hanging rock.
_Picnic_at_Hanging_Rock_ was more popular in Australia than here and inspired a great deal of speculation -- even at least one book -- about whether it was based on a true story and what was the solution to its mystery.
"Picnic At Hanging Rock" presents viewers with a scathing indictment of phony Victorian values.Set in Australia in the year 1900, the film tells the fictional story of a group of young girls who journey to a local natural attraction, a rugged volcanic mountain, with its big rocks, lush vegetation, strange birds, insects, and small reptiles.
Also, the girls, being roughly the same age and dressed almost alike, are hard to differentiate.Despite these complaints, the film exudes a wonderful aura of mystery, at least at Hanging Rock itself.
The housemaid, Minnie (Jacki Weaver), whose own sexuality is realised with the handyman, Tom (Tony Llewellyn-Jones), in stark contrast to the general ambience of repressed desire is one of the few who show Sara pity.In basing her fictional account on Hanging Rock, a sacred Aboriginal site, near Mount Macedon in Victoria, Lindsay demonstrates Miranda's sentiment that "Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place".
Lambert's portrayal of Miranda (an ironic reincarnation from her famed role in 1973 as the bed-hopping nymphomaniac in the Australian soap `Number 96') captures the vision perfectly with her ethereal loveliness and enigmatic smile, and is reminiscent of the knowing look on the death mask of the renowned `L'Inconnue de la Seine', who coincidentally died around 1900 in Paris.Picnic at Hanging Rock's eerie power is such that the strange sense of loss it induces remains some 22 years after my initial viewing, proving itself a masterpiece of any time..
Director Peter Weir creates a dreamy feeling to this mystery of the disappearance of three schoolgirls and a teacher during a picnic at Hanging Rock, Victoria in 1900, and that's probably the key to really enjoying this film, soaking up its atmosphere.
Sex and horror often go hand in hand because they are the most intense feelings you will ever experience.The music in stark contrast to the film seems to be heavy handed but actually succeeds in enhancing the atmosphere of the film - and it really is quite a beautiful score.Some may choose not to view it as mystery but as an allegory for a girl's journey into womanhood.
FYI: It is available on youtube, as are many classic Australian films :)I've always loved movies and books that take place at all-girls schools.
It's taken me possibly four viewings, over the years to get to this stage where I feel I now appreciate the film, rather than think it simply pretty, stuffy and meaningless.As part of Australian Cinema collection vol 1, 12 movie box set (so I don't know which edition I saw) this, considered classic by many, Aussie period piece from Peter Weir is known to have stamped authority on the Australian film-making scene that they could truly make world-class films.Amongst the order and strict routine of endless etiquette ritual amongst the girls at an exclusive boarding school, there becomes, on St Valentine's Day, 1900, a quietly brewing disruption that would change their lives forever.
The music in particular pinpricks the senses, making one feel quite unsettled - pocket-watches stop on the dot of midday and afterwards we hear of sightings of a 'red cloud' just then, too.I still believe that the film peaks too soon, all this happening around a quarter way in, leaving the remainder of the film for the salient questioning, searching for the missing and coping with the aftermath.Rachel Roberts - as all the cast are, is very good, often excellent; she's the formidable school headmistress, mixing restraint with authority, with just a hint of self doubt during the darkest hours of the dilemma.Without doubt, the star here is the cinematography, by Russell Boyd, the level of its sumptuousness as deep and thick as the finest carpet, delicate and luminously soft to convey a sense of the ethereal..
The movie is the story of a class of boarding school girls who go to a huge rock formation called Hanging Rock on Valentine's Day, 1900.
That book originally included a final chapter which gave an outrageous supernatural explanation for the girls' disappearance, but which the author (and Peter Weir) very wisely left out, knowing that it is the hideous obscurity of events that is the story's strength, and that concocting explanations for what happened will be its enduring point of interest.
That spurred me to revisit another masterpiece of mood.Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock is one of the most memorable films I have ever seen.
If ever a natural landscape existed for the sole purpose of filming a movie, it is hanging rock.
(An interesting note, a few people have recently pointed out to me that the cuts and marks on this boy, and the cuts and marks found on the found girl are nearly identical - perhaps a hint to the films mystery?) It is that mood which has never left me.Obviously, the story in Picnic at Hanging Rock, based on the novel, struck and continues to strike a sour note with audiences.
She becomes the major focus of attention after the disappearance, along with Mrs Appleyard, the brutish schoolmarm, growing ever more distressed in the aftermath of the disappearances.Picnic at Hanging Rock is not an unforgettable film simply the reasons I have discussed here, but because of the way they all work together to create such a creepy and threatening atmosphere.
The story at the heart of Picnic at Hanging Rock is outlined at the film's very beginning: an introductory text describes the mysterious disappearance of three schoolgirls and their teacher in the Australian outback.
The film itself is classic in my country, however I tried not to implant my own expectations on the work, rather attempting to approach it with an open mind.The story centers on several school girls who go missing while attending a school picnic at Hanging Rock on St.Valentines day 1900.
The story is about three Australian collage girls who disappeared on Hanging Rock without a trace at the beginning of the last century, but the real message of this film lies between the lines: the awakening of female sexuality, the degeneration of the conservative and the destinies that were connected with this incident.
I last saw "Picnic at Hanging Rock" about 13 years ago and I like everyone else was curious as to what happened to the missing people.Then by accident -- probably 10 years ago -- I came across an excellent review of this film where the reviewer may have solved its puzzle.
Picnic at Hanging Rock is a film based on the disappearance of several college students and a teacher on Valentines Day 1900.
The problem with being ambiguous is that you don't give your viewers a definite ending; so after spending nearly two hours watching Picnic at Hanging Rock; you don't really feel like you've seen anything.
The star of the film is the foreboding yet breathtaking "Hanging Rock" that represents a primal, mysterious prescence amongst the Victorian era women and curious adolescent school girls acting as a catalyst that changes everything in the world of the characters forever.The cinematography is excellent in capturing the untamed natural environment and the beauty of the characters.
Picnic at hanging rock is a well directed Australian film by Peter weir.
The film is about how a party of school girls from apple yard college, are going on a picnic to hanging rock.During the after noon several of the girls go missing without a trace which leaves a mystery in which leaves a plot to the movie, such as what did happen to the girls and how did they vanish without a trace.
Picnic at hanging rocking is a very well low concept mystery film leaving you with plenty of ideas on which keeps you guessing what did happen to the girls.
Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock is a very realistic film, which becomes a fantasy by using a device so simple, it's brilliant.
Four Australian college girls go hiking up the Volcanic side of Hanging Rock on their school's Valentine's day picnic.
It is only in the first thirty minutes that that the 'horror' part of the movie is established, with the majority of the film focusing on the mystery of the girls disappearance.As an achievement, 'Picnic' has so much going for it.
This is the setting for the beautiful 1975 film by Peter Weir, Picnic at Hanging Rock voted No 1 of the Top 10 Australian films of all time in a 1995 centenary of Australian cinema.
1st watched 9/5/1999 - 8 out of 10 (Dir-Peter Weir): Excellent eerie account of the disappearance of Australian school girls at Hanging Rock.The slow pace allows us to think about what happened to them while we explore the school and the way it works.