Picnic at Hanging Rock, 1975.
Directed by Peter Weir.
Starring Rachel Roberts, Dominic Guard, Helen Morse, and Jacki Weaver.
SYNOPSIS:
Director Peter Weir is well-known to film fans for his prodigious output during the 1980s, but 1975’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is the movie that kick-started his career and helped drive the so-called Australian New Wave of cinema. Criterion has issued the film on 4K Ultra HD with a new 4K transfer and the original archival bonus features from their 2014 Blu-ray disc.
Sometimes you just need to let a movie wash over you and think about it for a while after the end credits roll. Such is the case with Peter Weir’s break-out 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock, which was a hit in Australia and paved the way for him to produce a string of great movies in the United States, including Witness, which I reviewed on 4K Ultra HD not long ago.
Based on the novel by Joan Lindsay of the same name, Picnic at Hanging Rock follows a group of girls from a private school called Appleyard College as they take a day trip on Valentine’s Day, 1900 to a nearby rock formation. Four of them and one of their escorts wander away during the picnic and only one of them, Edith, returns to the group, but she can’t fully explain what happened.
The mysterious disappearance becomes the talk of the local town, and a young Englishman named Michael, who saw the girls before they disappeared, takes an interest in trying to find them. He takes his reluctant footman with him and ends up spending the night at Hanging Rock alone before finding one of the missing girls, Irma; unfortunately, she is unable to shed any additional light on what happened.
In the meantime, a girl at the school who didn’t attend the picnic, Sara, becomes distraught over what has happened because she was close to one of the missing students. Her distress grows when the school’s headmistress, Mrs. Appleyard, informs her that the couple who plucked her from an orphanage are behind on tuition payments, which could result in her expulsion.
The second half of the film plays out as a police procedural, although without the kind of satisfying conclusion one expects from such stories. That’s not a bad thing, though, as the story litters various clues throughout its nearly two-hour running time.
The parts of the story that take place at Hanging Rock have a gauzy haze, as if there’s some kind of otherworldly interference that affects anyone who dares to explore its winding rock-walled pathways. Is it some kind of ghostly or demonic presence? Or are we meant to see it as some kind of fever dream that masks an actual real world horror?
The film is never explicit about that, leaving the viewer to, as I said, think about it while the end credits roll. The way the story unspools, the viewer is free to interpret the tale any way they wish, and that’s okay with me.
This edition is the movie’s debut on 4K Ultra HD disc, courtesy of Criterion, which previously issued it on Blu-ray a decade ago. Picnic at Hanging Rock was restored in 4K for this release, and the new version was approved by Weir and director of photography Russell Boyd. A Blu-ray is also included, which I’m pretty sure is the same disc Criterion previously released.
The bonus features are all found on the Blu-ray disc, starting with a nine-minute introduction to the film by scholar David Thomson. As you might imagine, it’s the kind of thing that sounds like it would be right at home in a college film class, and that’s the kind of extra I love. The rest of the extras include:
• Everything Begins and Ends (31 minutes): Created in 2003, this is a making-of that doesn’t feature Weir but does include co-producers Hal and Jim McElroy, executive producer Patricia Lovell, and others.
• A Recollection… Hanging Rock 1900 (27 minutes): Produced by Lovell, this is a documentary that was put together when the film was being made. As a result, we get to hear from Weir, Lovell, members of the cast, author Joan Lindsay, and others while they were in the thick of things, as it were. I always appreciate how that kind of making-of contrasts with ones created later.
• Peter Weir (25 minutes): Conducted in 2003, this is an extensive interview with the director that covers not just Picnic at Hanging Rock but also the Australian film scene of the 1970s and how it paved the way for the Aussie wave of the 80s.
• Homesdale (50 minutes): This is an award-winning black-and-white movie Weir made in 1971, which prompted Lovell to contact him about adapting Picnic at Hanging Rock.
The original trailer for the movie rounds out the platter. Criterion’s obligatory booklet includes an essay by author Megan Abbott along with a relevant excerpt from the 1996 book Peter Weir: When Cultures Collide, by film critic Marek Haltof.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Brad Cook
