This sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath put director Peter Weir on the map and helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema. Based on an acclaimed 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock concerns a small group of students from an all-female college who vanish, along with a chaperone, while on a St. Valentine’s Day outing in the year 1900.
(Picnic at Hanging Rock is) a movie that creates a specific place in your mind; free of plot, lacking any final explanation, it exists as an experience. In a sense, the viewer is like the girls who went along on the picnic and returned safely: For us, as for them, the characters who disappeared remain always frozen in time, walking out of view, never to be seen again. One of the women has something happen to her inside the cave — the novel never explains what it is–and her sexual hysteria fuels the rest of the story. The underlying suggestion is that Victorian attitudes toward sex, coupled with the unsettling mysteries of an ancient land, lead to events the modern mind cannot process. That is exactly the message of “Picnic at Hanging Rock.”- Roger Ebert
Starring Rachel Roberts, Anne Lambert, Jacki Weaver.
Note: Willow and Thatch gives this film two teacups up – not one for the family or when you need a feel good experience, but for the more moody, meditative, visual and conceptual experience.