A mesmerising film about colonialism, sexual repression and Antonioni-esque alienation, Picnic at Hanging Rock's dreamlike aesthetic is haunting. Glad to see that Anna Backman Rogers's BFI monograph on this book finally calls out something that everyone seems afraid of saying: that this looks like 1970s softcore pornography.
It is not, to my mind, accidental that the credit 'directed by Peter Weir' appears superimposed over an over-the-shoulder shot of Marion placing a white rose within a flower press and then gently working its screws into hermetic closure.[…]
If Picnic is a strikingly beautiful film, one must question what that beauty is being put in service of: what ios that actually concealing from us? And, by extension, if Picnic haunts us, it is precisely because of that powerful undertow, because of the spectral absence we do not want to acknowledge, and yet which insistently returns to perturb us and to force us. […] Picnic invokes the affective territory of horror by demanding that we direct our attention away from what we hear and see superficially in order to attend to what remains radically out of frame.
[…]
It is Mlle de Poitiers [who] defines how Miranda is to be seen posthumously: as a 'Botticelli angel'. This is a curious description because the image she is likening Miranda to is in fact The Birth of Venus. This hybrid characterisation of Miranda as both goddess and celestial being is cardinal to understanding the film's ideological construction of femininity as both other-worldly and yet as natural as a pearl, [as] both sexual and virginal, as both physical presence and absent object of desire.
[…]
Davina Quillivan has aptly noted that this is a film in which the female characters write themselves out of a narrative into which they refuse to be made to fit. They constitute, she argues, 'the vanishing point within patriarchal cinema, as Dora is a vanishing point in Freud's case study'.
— Anna Backman Rogers: BFI Film Classics: Picnic at Hanging Rock (2022)
Originally the novel concluded with a chapter that her editor reasonably rejected, one that teeters between the baffling and the bizarre, finally landing with a supernatural thud. Lindsay (who died in 1984) had willingly agreed to omit it.
— Thom Delapa (Cineaste, Fall 2024)
As the film goes on, there’s an increasing displeasure in the acts of those who stunt creation and fantasy in the name of history and rules, which are here wielded as weapons of restraint by the Appleyard School.[…]
Whatever happened to the missing young women is effectively haunting and strange, but it’s ultimately not nearly as bewildering as the way the other schoolgirls (and teachers) turn on Irma, who’s tied up and persecuted for information by her classmates.
— Chris Cabin (Slant Magazine)
Hanging Rock has echoes of L’Avventura and Psycho, two movies that create an existential void when a main character vanishes less than midway through. It is more genteel yet more erotically charged than either — “both spooky and sexy,” Vincent Canby wrote in his 1979 New York Times review.
— J. Hoberman (New York Times)
Synopsis: In the early 1900s, Miranda attends a girls boarding school in Australia. One Valentine's Day, the school's typically strict headmistress treats the girls to a picnic field trip to an unusual but scenic volcanic formation called Hanging Rock. Despite rules against it, Miranda and several other girls venture off. It's not until the end of the day that the faculty realizes the girls and one of the teachers have disappeared mysteriously.