Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
Directed by Peter Weir
Starring Rachel Roberts
Gallipoli (1981)
Directed by Peter Weir
Starring Mel Gibson and Mark Lee
Prior to the mid-70s, Australian film was a real backwater, with few
films ever seen outside the country, and what there was mostly limited to
brainless comedies. But starting with the films of Peter Weir (b. 1944), things
changed. First his films got acclaim at the Cannes festival, then the European
art film market, then finally the US. This opened things up for stylish money-makers
like Mad Max (1979). Weir later broke into the US market with Witness
(1985), The Dead Poet’s Society (1989), then The Truman Show (1998).
All these films combine an arty, unique style with popular filmmaking and big
stars like Jim Carey, Robin Williams and Mel Gibson. Yet the film I like best
is his second, Picnic at Hanging Rock, a gorgeous, haunting film not
easily classified as either romance, mystery, or horror. It’s about a group of
virginal girls that goes on a picnic in 1900, as a diversion from their rigidly
patrolled boarding school. Their destination is the menacing Hanging Rock, a
formation of towering, primitive, phallic stones jutting up from the flat
Australian landscape. Two of the girls vanish, along with one of the school
governesses. This happens less than halfway into the film after a spooky,
haunting opening. Somehow, the young director holds together the last half of
his film without the usual mystery devices of clues, hints, or even pacing that
indicates resolution of the mystery is to come. He holds fast to a slow,
mysterious, uncertain tone, in which nothing is quite what it seems, and we are
left without resolution, really a remarkable thing for such a young director.
There are times when this feels like a horror film. But who is the
monster? It’s the rocks themselves. Anyone who has walked among the narrow slot
canyons or rock pinnacles of Utah has gotten the feeling of being vulnerable.
Here, the dark black rocks, with their “faces” tie into the very nature of
Australia, a country of prisoners and aristocrats dropped into a hostile,
desert-covered landscape with a thriving, yet reclusive and mystic aboriginal
culture. The film plays on the vulnerability of these white-clad virgins being
eaten up by these towering rocks. We see them walking in the crevasses,
photographed as from the vantage of a stalker…but who is it? The primal panpipe
score by Zamfir, gauzy cinematography, close-ups of creeping snakes, lizards,
and spiders, and use of slow motion makes the whole landscape seem unreal.
Again, this is familiar to me from hiking in desert environments, where there
is an odd sense of vastness and menace. The girls seem oblivious to the danger,
except for one who is hyper-aware of it, and runs off screaming, as if
possessed or running from a werewolf in a conventional horror film. When the three
girls disappear, slow motion, into a rocky cleft, we really sense they will
never come out. One later does, but has amnesia about anything that happened. Weir
conveys the menace of nature better than in any film I have seen. Yes, it is
also a mystery film, with conventions of bloodhound-searches for the bodies, tantalizing
clues of pieces of their dresses left behind…but never a real explanation. And
when the girls abandon their chaste formality to turn like vicious dogs on a
surviving girl who cannot explain the fate of the other, we have a mini Lord
of the Flies on our hands, all the scarier when girls do it instead of boys.
On top of this is a remarkable sense of repressed sexuality. First
we have adolescent girls stroking each other’s long hair in the confined
boarding school, sleeping together, and dancing around nude statues of St.
Valentine, always wearing their chaste white Victorian layers of clothing. But,
as some of the girls wander off into the phallic landscape, they first remove
their shoes, then stockings. Shockingly, their corsets are found, left behind.
Was this for comfort? For something else? Catch the image below, with sexuality oozing. It reminds me of when I happened upon a group of
giggling teenage girls in the towering landscape of Arches National Park in
Utah—the juxtaposition was jarring, as it is in this film. Lesbian love is
implied, never stated. The governess who also disappears is clearly the “companion”
of the rigid head master of the school (a terrific Rachel Roberts), who misses
her “masculine intellect” after she disappears, seen ascending into the rocks
wearing only her knickers, not her Victorian dress. All this sexual tension is
hinted at, not explained. The film really centers on the most beautiful of the
girls, Miranda, the fantasy object of a teen boy, a female teacher, and
apparently most of the other girls. Even after she disappears, Weir brings her
back in fantasy-dream sequences of the teen boy, who conflates her with the
image of a swan.
Together, this all forms an allegory of what happens when “civilization”
intrudes on a violent, primal landscape, or perhaps what happens when we deny
our own primal side. We get swallowed by big, primal monoliths. I think this
kind of compelling slow-motion film was what Kubrick tried (and failed) to do
in Barry Lyndon, which just seems tedious by comparison. This is a remarkable
film.
I will briefly mention Weir’s comparison film Gallipoli from
a few years later. This is a much more conventional commercial film about the
famed, and ill-fated Australian expedition to try to conquer the Gallipoli
peninsula in Turkey during World War I. This is famous in Australia as the
birth of their country’s identity, even though the mission was a failure and a
bloodbath. Most of it is pretty routine war drama, but with an intense anti-war
spin, showing the futility of WWI and the cynical disregard for young lives better
than most. But if Picnic at Hanging Rock is about what girls do together
when isolated, Gallipoli treats what men do. The friendship between two
soldiers (Mel Gibson and Mark Lee) is chaste, and not-quite-homosexual, yet
Weir coaxes a sexual tension out of the two, with the same sort of understated gestures
as in Picnic. At one point masses of soldiers strip naked to swim, but are
shelled by artillery as they frolic in the water, and Weir then orchestrates a
mix of beautiful male bodies clinging to one another, with blood filling the
water. Again, sex amid horror, but all very repressed.
Slow motion is again
featured—the film ends with the innocent looking Archie slow-motion sprinting
towards the Turkish machine guns, then getting gunned down in slow frames to
end the film. Yep, this is almost a cliché (slow motion machine-gunning) as in The
Godfather and Bonnie and Clyde, but in those the slow motion
accentuates the violence. Here it is beautiful, futile death. Weir is, and remains,
an intensely creative visual director, making even his most routine films worth
watching.
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