Peter Weir’s “Picnic
at Hanging Rock” is a mystery with no answer. It’s 1900 Australia and a group
of girls from an elite finishing school leave for a picnic at Hanging Rock, a chunk
of mountain with a near-supernatural magnetism. It looms as a god, setting visitors
in a daze. Watches stop. People sleep. Four girls wonder for no reason but curiosity.
Three disappear, one returns panicked. The vanished girls drop the perfect façade
of the school and town into hysteria, order and etiquette shattering. People don’t
fear the girls’ deaths, they fear their “violation.” The unknown expands. Weir uses
glowing cinematography and pan-flute music to portray the perfection that we all desire
to build us for the fall. Life is unanswerable, we cannot escape it reciting
poetry or meeting dinner time. The only innocent free girl throws herself to
death. The grand head mistress (Rachel Roberts) loses her glory to reality, her
fate leads back to that Rock. Honestly, “Picnic” is perfect, as defined as what
we are not shown, by as what we are. It is art that cannot be explained or crunched
into a few sentences, it must be seen. On repeat. Endlessly fascinating. A+
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