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By Roderick Heath

It was easy as a young Australian movie fan to hate Picnic at Hanging Rock, so culturally ubiquitous—quoted in advertising and satirised on television and constantly cited in best-of lists. Thanks to its unassailable status as the internationally successful flagship film of the Aussie New Wave of the 1970s, with its images of white-clad young ladies climbing the phallic reaches of the eponymous outcrop, it was often hard to see the movie for the stills. Picnic at Hanging Rock, at the time of its release, and still today, was a challenge and a contradiction, a deliberate, purposeful inversion of the sweaty, masculine obsessions of Australian’s pop culture of the period and the insistently literal precincts of our national artistic temperament.

A certain archness was certainly detectable in Peter Weir’s handling of his adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel, with Weir’s determination to be ambiguous, moody, and classy so thorough as to risk pretension. In 1998, Weir sparked some amusement by releasing a director’s cut that, departing from the usual result of adding sloppy footage better left on the editing room floor, actually made his film somewhat shorter. This editing considerably strengthens a film that was already an effectively eerie and suggestive piece of work. The wonder of Hanging Rock is that it conjures, without explicating, a firm sense of its thematic imperatives, lurking dark and dangerous like rocks under a placid lake surface. And, indeed, that is exactly what the story is about, the thin, tense membrane that is civilisation stretched over primordial truths and vulnerable, at the slightest violation, to total disruption.

Hanging Rock splits into three distinct parts. In the first, the girls attending Mrs. Appleyard’s College for Young Ladies in rural Victoria take a day’s sojourn to Hanging Rock, a volcanic flume more than 500 feet high and a million years old, says their escorting teacher, the mathematics tutor Miss McCraw (Vivean Gray) in rapt, almost worshipful terms. Her fellow escort is the French mistress, Mlle. De Poitiers (Helen Morse), and senior amongst their charges are Miranda St. Clare (Anne-Louise Lambert), Marion Quade (Jane Vallis), and Irma Leopold (Karen Robson). Meanwhile, Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts) remains at the school to deal out correction to Sara Waybourne (Margaret Nelson), an orphan girl who’s utterly besotted with the flaxen-haired, angelic-faced Miranda, a figure of general admiration amongst the girls.

At Hanging Rock, the girls and their teachers lounge lazily in the sun, with another luncheon party close at hand, that of Colonel and Mrs. Fitzhubert (Peter Collingwood and Olga Dickie) and their visiting English nephew, Michael (Dominic Guard), who, in spite of his well-bred reserve, enjoys the company of their coarse, but good-natured coachman, Albert Crundall (John Jarrat). Miranda, Marion, Irma, and a fourth girl, the chubby, shrill, foolish Edith Horton (Christine Schuler), decide to climb the rock. They pass by Michael and Albert, who desire them in their disparate fashions. As the four girls near the pinnacle of the rock, a strange daze seems to overcome them and draw them on, except for Edith, who freaks out and runs screaming back to the picnic. It soon becomes apparent that Miss McCraw has vanished, too, and Edith reports having seen her marching along the path stripped down to her pantaloons. Police searches turn up nothing.

In the central third of the film, Michael, haunted by Miranda’s face, convinces a reluctant Albert to help him conduct a new search, and Michael stays alone overnight on the rock. When Albert comes back for him the next day, he finds Michael distraught and disheveled, clutching a piece of a dress that proves to belong to Irma, who’s lying bruised and unconscious a short distance away. She and Michael, having braved the mysterious barriers the rock has thrown up, recover and are briefly, intensely linked by the haunting loss of the others, but Irma cannot remember what happened, and both soon go on their separate journeys back to Europe. In the final third, Mrs. Appleyard, consumed with repressed self-pity and frustration as the events and her staff’s desertion hurt her school’s reputation and income, makes Sara her sacrificial lamb. She resolves to send Sara back to the orphanage when her guardian fails to pay his fees on time. Sara commits suicide by hurling herself from the school roof, an act Mrs. Appleyard soon replicates from the heights of Hanging Rock.

The drama commences on St Valentine’s Day, 1900, a date that’s hardly accidental, as the girls’ burgeoning sexuality intermingles with a moony, romantic longing they express in waking up to their valentine cards imprinted with love poetry. The ranked girls strap each other into their corsets in scenes photographed and acted with an air of naïf Victorian sentimentality over an intense, adolescent, almost asexual variety of romantic longing, whilst portraying the effort required to maintain that image of perfection. Miranda is the purest avatar of this stylised version of femininity, declared to be a “Botticelli angel” by De Poitiers. Lindsay’s positioning of this drama then confirms that not only is her story a metaphor for nature overpowering temporal concepts of innocence, but also signals the death of those idealised Victorian images at the commencement of a rowdier century. The narrative then becomes a metaphor for the shattering of a social idyll, whilst revolving around elements directly out of fairy tales: the girls disappear within the earth as in The Pied Piper myth, whilst Albert’s following Michael’s trail of notepaper evokes Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumb trail, and Mrs. Appleyard seems very much like the wicked stepmother of many a Grimm tale.

Weir defines the women as pinioned into immobility by the social custom. When the picnickers reach the rock, Weir conjures images of the girls and their two teachers sitting in artfully arrayed compositions, sprawled in the heat with doll-like prettiness: they’re not allowed to take their gloves off until they’ve passed through the town, and so intensive is their division from the everyday world that they can’t even approach the Fitzhuberts’ party. The endangered quartet’s embarkation up the rock takes on the air of restless motion, searching with spiritual intensity for some act of realisation: whilst they seem to be drawn on by a force outside themselves, it is nonetheless mobilising. The three “chosen” girls who ignore Edith and proceed on the final march into rock’s crescent have all removed their stockings and shoes (McCray, who mysteriously follows, removes her dress entirely), taking on the look of maidens about to engage in mystic rites: McCray, although seemingly distinct from the girls in age and bearing, is probably also a virgin, and her fascination with scientific signifiers—she’s seen reading a book on geometry—both channels and conceals her intense awareness of the rock’s nature. Later, Irma is found disturbingly lacking her corset, but it’s repeatedly noted that she has remained “intact.”

Such is the swooning formal mastery of the film’s first half-hour—with its lilting Gheorghe Zamfir panpipe theme, rumbling, eerie sound effects, and peering camera evoking the primal threat inherent in the rock and pregnant with approaching, mysterious calamity—that almost anything that follows can be expected to be rather disappointing. However, the second act is just as compelling, with a compulsive, swashbuckling zest that’s a reminder that Weir would later build similar excitement with aplomb in Gallipoli (1981) and his best film to date, Master and Commander (2003). These, Weir’s finest gifts, contrast the weaker elements of the film, which betray a certain lily-livered refusal to live up to its own generic underpinnings, copying instead the set templates of “art” cinema, pinching the frieze-like visuals of Last Year at Marienbad, the instantly nostalgic, haunting last shot of The 400 Blows (which Weir would recycle again in Gallipoli), and the unresolved, flailing narratives of Antonioni, transposed to an Australian setting.

This worked well enough to sell it at Cannes, but it only reproduces rather than subverts the same pattern that Weir’s eye perceives so clearly—the incongruity of the transplanted English proprieties of the school, with its Edwardian architectural pretences, and the lifestyle of its inhabitants in an altogether harsher, less forgiving Australian environment. Picnic at Hanging Rock, although free of clear manifestations of violence except in comprehending Sara’s mangled body after her suicide, is still demonstrably a horror film, and it came along when other genre directors were toying with similar levels of narrative ambiguity and also very different manifestations of rampaging irrationality assaulting sunny holidayers, in films like Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974), Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), and Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes (1977; a title that might have suited this film just as well).

It also accords, in muted and unconventional terms, with the slippery sensuousness of retro-feminine glamour in films like those of Jesus Franco, Harry Kuemel, and Jean Rollin, or, from the trashiest end of the spectrum, Narcisco Serrador’s La Residencia, likewise set in a period girls’ boarding school. Weir was much-praised for not giving in to some of the tempting exploitative aspects of that sort of film. Hanging Rock’s template is mercilessly mainstream and curiously worshipful of the qualities it contends were exhausted and contradictory: it preserves the sentimental in visual aspic. In some ways Weir’s film is also a variation on Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, revolving around similarly ambiguous phenomena that telegraph humanity’s tenuous place in the universe and false veneers of civilisation crumbling before that terrifying truth. Of course, the story can be theoretically explained in literal terms—the girls may have fallen victim to an accident or to an assaulting interloper, but oddly enough, most readings still lead back to the same point. Miranda, Irma, and Marion, in their desire to learn something immutable and venture beyond the limits of their frail civilisation, place themselves in the way of violent natural forces.

Weir knowingly pictures the phallic reaches and vaginal portals of the rock: the girls disappear within one such hole, the mouth of which Michael later struggles, in desperate physical effort, to reach. Sara’s crush on Miranda seems more like adolescent hero-worship than genuine, Sapphic desire that would more work more congruously with the themes of love and carnality. Problematically, the screenplay and visualisation fall back on some stock figures to invoke the oppositions that riddle its structure. Mrs. Appleyard’s stony, self-destructive use of Sara as cannon fodder in her war to keep the school afloat anticipates the more literal concept of Britain using Australian soldiers in Gallipoli. Edith’s plump, whiny irritation far too obviously offsets the other girls’ blooming, beatific perfection as an image of vulgarity leeching off beauty: if the film was true to its pagan proclivities, rather than honouring Victorian sentimentalism, Edith would look like the more appropriate earth mother avatar.

Edward and Albert likewise contrast each other a little too neatly in versions of masculinity: Edward, stiff and very English but also proper and brave like a knight of romantic fiction, and Albert the drawling, realistic, honest Aussie to the marrow. Tellingly, Albert and Sara are actually brother and sister, having both been brought up in the orphanage together but separated: their alienation from each other actualises the enforced, unnatural distance between women and men that is the story’s motif. Irma seems to be given up by the rock for not being blonde, as a consolation prize for Michael’s ardent bravery. The film extends the obviousness of the Miranda/Edith split by similarly leaving De Poitiers to contrast with the remaining teacher in the school, Miss Lumley (Kirstey Child), similarly dumpy and shrill, who hysterically hides behind her piano when the girls mob Irma in frustrated outrage when she comes for a farewell visit, and straps Sara to the wall to cure her poor posture; the admirable De Poitiers, beautiful and refined, ends Irma’s abuse, slaps Edith in the face, and releases Sara.

Of course, the story is less about trying to define the indefinable than studying the repercussions of manifestations of the immutable upon the fragility of the genteel world, which, once disturbed, like the surface tension of water, disintegrates entirely. The crumbling façade of Appleyard’s world can only end in her death and the annihilation of all that seemed so solid at the outset. Weir’s trimmed-down director’s cut greatly improves the film’s final section in this regard. Where there seemed to a half-hearted suggestion of romantic longing between Michael and Irma in the original version, the cleaner narrative line bears out the crack-up of the social pretences as the keynote to the conclusion. Michael remains haunted by Miranda (the repetition of the initial M which joins Michael, Miranda, Marion and McQuade is probably not coincidental) as a vision of paradise lost, whilst Albert is visited by a dream of his sister saying farewell to him at what is revealed to be the same time that she killed herself.

Weir’s maintenance of mood, for all the film’s fragile aspects, was always admirable, and he all the more efficiently suggests the fantastic by providing a rich level of tactile detail in setting, casting, and costuming, such as the hint of the slovenly that dogs the ineffectual local police sergeant Bumpher (Wyn Roberts) contrasting the fastidious perfection of Appleyard’s pompadour. Indeed, perhaps the single strongest quality of Picnic at Hanging Rock, and one that was picked up by later variations like Weir’s own The Last Wave (1977) and Colin Eggleston’s cult film Long Weekend (1978), is that it successfully defined the latent unease that has always rested beneath Australians and their sense of their own nation’s landscape and the world in general, that is, a catastrophic sense of nature and paranoia about a continent that promised so much bounty and proved to be little more than a great desert with relatively small regions of fecund earth. Weir’s vision of the landscape rejects the iconic admiration John Ford might have brought to it. Where the initial paranoia of Europeans to enter America’s forests, well-defined and remembered in works like Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter, diffused eventually, Picnic at Hanging Rock describes the raw anxiety Australia’s landscape and rugged history of conquest by economic slaves and decimated indigenous peoples as having never entirely faded.

Hanging Rock is also uncommonly well-acted for an Australian film of the period, something which confirms Weir’s sheer professionalism as being more advanced than any rivals on the scene, save for Bruce Beresford, rather than his artistry, which was to prove readily applicable to Hollywood filmmaking. The film also established Weir’s regular collaborator, DP Russell Boyd, as the second god of Australian cinematographers (after Robert Krasker and before Christopher Doyle). The admirable turns range from the perfect, melancholy radiance of Lambert as Miranda, always the singular image of the film in spite of her unremarkable subsequent career, to the cast-iron intensity of Roberts and the pathos of Nelson as Sara. Guard, as Michael, is supposed to be bland, which is good because that’s all he is, but Jarrat, a familiar figure of Aussie screen and television, is great as Albert. Decades later, Picnic at Hanging Rock remains intriguing, inspiring, disconcerting, and ultimately, frustrating.

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Director: Ray Lawrence

By Roderick Heath

Ray Lawrence reappeared on the map 16 years after his cinematic debut—the unwatchable Bliss (1985)—with the much-praised drama Lantana (2001), an Altmanesque multi-strand drama following a group of mostly middle-class Sydneysiders and what happens to their psyches and relationships following a woman’s disappearance. Lantana proved that adult drama could be a box office draw here in Australia. I found the film as insufferable as a high schooler trying to act serious and troubled in order to impress chicks; brows were furrowed, moody words were uttered, intrigue was developed, dingy colours filtered every scene, and in the end, as Bob Dylan once sang, nothing was revealed. The film put on the trappings of a dramatic thriller and proved to be a shaggy dog story. L’Avventura it was not. Antonioni’s film understood the nature and power of ambiguity—the mysteries of its plot were matched by the mysteries of its characters, whereas the dramatic situations of Lantana took the psychological acumen of a Dr. Phil episode and matched it to scenes that came across precisely as what they were—acting exercises straight off the stage.

Jindabyne also pays a nod to Altman by way of being based on the same Raymond Carver short story “So Much Water So Close To Home” that Altman used as part of the texture of Short Cuts (1993). As with Lantana, Lawrence uses a genre plot to make a domestic drama. Jindabyne is a popular resort spot in the Southern Alps, the southern end of the same mountain chain, the Great Dividing Range, I live in. Jindabyne is situated above a lake formed for the huge hydroelectric scheme built in the Snowy Mountains in the 1950s. The old town lies under the lake, a detail played for maximum symbolic value, as it was in Cate Shortland’s unusually good Somersault (2004)—submerged lives, ghosts of the past, and all that jazz.

Carver’s story, cited as a masterpiece of his minimalist style, presents a wife who recounts how her husband Stuart and his friends said they had found a girl’s corpse in the Naches River whilst on a fishing vacation, tethered it for the duration, and got down to their usual business of boozing and fly-casting. The men are infamous for this, and the wife is troubled. She later encounters a man on the road who may be just a creepy letch—or the girl’s murderer. Reports come through of the killer’s arrest. The wife says to a friend, “They have friends, these killers. You can’t tell,” indicating she thinks perhaps her husband and his friends may have been involved. However, balance seems to be restored when the wife responds to a come-on from Stuart. It’s a work whose effectiveness stems from the wife’s attempt to read her husband, and men in general, comes up a total blank, female emotiveness helpless before male taciturnity. It evokes a certain type of American male who would rather be shot than use the word “feeling” in a sentence, and how ambiguous, even menacing, such a trait can be in this circumstance.

Most Aussie males are similar, so theoretically the new locale makes a good fit. But Jindabyne can’t quite do this story, nor can it do the story it has to tell. Such a story involves a rupture in the everyday fabric, but Lawrence’s film piles on portent you could cut with a knife. Like Lantana, which visually referenced an a true crime moment in a sequence involving a roadside dummy dressed like the missing woman patterned after a real-life police stunt in looking for the killers of two teens in the 1990s, Jindabyne recalls Bradley John Murdoch’s attack on Joanne Lees and Peter Falconio.The killer, played by Chris Haywood (who, if he hasn’t been in every Aussie film ever made, it sure feels like it), shadows the highway and, in the opening, gets a young Aboriginal woman named Susan (Tatea Reilly) to pull her car over. The moment is charged, especially when Haywood screams schizophrenic ravings. For some reason, Susan sits there and waits to be murdered instead of driving off, as Lawrence’s camera flies back.

Stuart (Gabriel Byrne) is an Irish champion rally driver who has retired to a dull, overworked life running a car repair shop in Jindabyne. Surveying his greying hair, he dyes it. He has a son, Tom (Sean Rees-Wemyss), by his American wife Claire (Laura Linney), who, in a fit of postnatal depression, left Stuart with the baby for 18 months. Stuart’s mother Vanessa (Betty Lucas) also lives with them, frustrating Claire’s maternal authority. Their neighbours Carl (John Howard) and Jude (Debora Lee-Furness) have a worse pain to hide, the death of their daughter, which left them saddled with their inherently weird, budding Goth granddaughter Caylin-Calandria (Eva Lazzaro). Tom and Caylin play together, engaging in activities like trying to sacrifice their schoolmates’ pet guinea pig to dark forces. Billy (Simon Stone) works for Stuart and lives with hippie girlfriend Elissa (Alice Garner) in a campervan. Rocco (Stelios Yakimis) is married to Aboriginal schoolteacher Carmel (Leah Purcell). The four families congregate at a dinner before the four men set off on the trip that fills their dreams. We see the killer dump the girl’s body in a river; he keeps her car in a shed on his property. Stuart finds the body and freaks out; Carl twists his ankle, and, deciding they can’t do anything about it, they tether the corpse in the water where the chill will prevent it rotting, and go about their fishing.

Billy tires first of the charade, and after two days, they all hike out of the hills and phone the police. They are, of course, soon lambasted by cops, media, and family. Worst of all, the racial identity of the girl causes local Aboriginal youths to throw bricks through windows, upturn offices, and generally abuse the four men. Carmel is livid, and her marriage with Rocco seems shattered. Jude, very Aussie, is as dismissive of the event as she was with Caylin’s rodent killing. Claire is deeply affected and ashamed, very American in her desire to heal and connect; she takes up a collection to help pay for the funeral, which the family rebuffs, questioning her motives. Stuart remains incommunicative, and Claire’s nerves fray.

I’d like to say the slow burn of guilt, recrimination, and shadowy threat combusts, but really it just squelches. Claire and Stuart have a bust-up, in which Stuart admits he rejoiced in escaping his overworked life in the glory of nature for a few days. Caylin seems to be tempted to let Tom drown in another of her death experiments, but then saves him. Bill and Elissa leave for the north coast, abandoning Stuart to work alone in the garage. Claire threatens to leave Stuart, and gives the money she collected to the local pastor (Bud Tingwell). Haywood’s working at the church and follows Claire, getting her to pull off the road; he eyes her with menace but then seeming to decide she’s a bit close to home, and drives away. She goes to the Smoking Ritual, a rite held by Susan’s family and tribal folk to exorcise the hills. Stuart, Carl, and Rocco arrive on their own accord, and Stuart apologises to Susan’s father (Kevin Smith), who throws dirt in his face and spits on the ground. Stuart and Claire, nonetheless, kiss and make up. Haywood continues to sit in wait for prey on the highway.

Spurning manhunt or melodrama, Jindabyne claims to be a social, familial, and moral study; if a bogeyman really does start terrorising us, how will we act? The tacked-on racial theme seems present mainly for its topicality, and distracts from Carver’s theme of misogyny. Because we know the men didn’t kill Susan, the tension of responsibility is discharged. But it is unfair to compare constantly to Carver. Jindabyne is its own creation, distinct in purposes from Carver’s story (and also Altman’s, whose approach was a blackly humorous absurdity as the fisherman garrulously enjoyed themselves whilst regarding the body as equivalent to rubbish). Making Stuart and Claire foreigners might emphasise disconnection, but also alienates them from the crucial sense of normality, and of questioning of a cultural imperative that is urgent in the matter. Lawrence’s consistent theme is the pain that lies underneath ordinary lives, and Jindabyne is at least not as arch as Lantana, a film so obsessed with its style it felt like a lawn clipped with scissors. But Lawrence can’t resist these put-on narratives, and never seems to arrive at saying something indelible. His resolutions trail off into mutterings under his breath.

Restrained emotionalism reigns, but the closeted hysteria that is always the flipside of such behaviour (and situations) is absent. Lawrence tries to show decency essentially maintaining itself—Caylin’s decision to save Tom mirrors the men’s fronting up to their shame with Susan’s family—but the film is so afraid of the powerful events and feelings with which it want to engage it fails to fulfil itself in the most crucial way: Why should we care? The men are all far from heroic, but also not convincingly foolish or self-absorbed enough to make their actions believable. The closest of the characters to the psychological type Carver was studying is Carl, who, when Billy mentions that Elissa is bisexual, henceforth describes her as “The Lesbian” who commands him, the film’s sole acknowledgement of a kind of aggressively macho mindset, the only element of the film that hints at real meat instead of pussyfooting. But Lawrence keeps reducing this to a punchline, and Elissa plays no part in the story.

Because Lawrence shows us the men finding the body, etc., the ambiguity of the situation is almost entirely lost; we know they didn’t kill her, that they got no special thrill from it, and we’re left with one slightly strained reading of the situation. (Couldn’t one of them have walked to the top of the hill and called the cops? It would probably have ruined their weekend less; alternatively, why weren’t any of them clever enough to think, hey, why don’t we say we didn’t find it until the last day? Because then there’d be no story!) Lawrence can’t portray real sexism, racism, carelessness over the dead, bloodshed, marital strife, or anything, just more furrowed brows. Dramatically the film walks on eggshells, afraid to ruffle things up with something rude or not absorbed into its glowering mediocrity.

What especially amuses me about Jindabyne is that it owes all of its attempts to capture and hold interest by stealing the tropes of genre filmmaking, but holds itself above such disciplines of generic storytelling. Jindabyne lays on menace with a trowel and reminded me a half-dozen horror films on the way as well as self-consciously referencing Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and borrowing horror movie tropes for magical-gothic trappings. Caylin-Calandria and Tom believe that the submerged village is the home of zombies, and that the adults are being infected by zombiedom, which tries to add to the moody portent but also amusingly conjures the episode of The Simpsons in which children misinterpret adults’ sexual dalliances as evidence of a conspiracy of “reverse-vampires.” A moment where Billy stands under weirdly singing power lines, presaging the upcoming discovery of the body, is a direct quote from Sidney Hayers’ In the Devil’s Garden (1971). When the men are in the bush, Lawrence has shaky POV shots from the bush, as if they’re being watched, one of the oldest stunts in the book. Haywood’s truck, his grizzled threat, and the deliberate irresolution evoke another film based on Bradley Murdoch; yes, Jindabyne is the arthouse equivalent of Wolf Creek.

Lawrence obviously thinks he’s made a troubling, incisive drama about the frailty of average human lives. In fact, all he’s really done is prove how weak-kneed his approach is compared with the attack of Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left or The Hills Have Eyes, which don’t just ruffle the feathers of the family unit, but eat them alive. Jindabyne is closely related to a film like In the Bedroom (2001), a film that also curiously failed through an overly artful approach so concerned about avoiding exploitativeness that it missed something crucial about life-and-death situations.