Peter Weir returned to his watershed film in 1998, according to Pat Lovell (executive producer), in order to remove any pretty romances and speed up the final act. For this revised version the sound quality has been enhanced and the look improved through colour regrading, although unusually seven minutes have been cut from the original and sadly a couple of key scenes involving Irma (Karen Robson) have been omitted. The tone is set from the beginning by Anne Louise Lambert as the seemingly charmed Miranda who provides a voice-over paraphrasing Edgar Allan Poe with "What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream". Whilst various clues are shared with us, no attempt is made to solve the puzzle and we are told at the outset that some of those who start out for the St Valentine's Day picnic in 1900 are never to return. An apparently idyllic way of life is not what it first seems when this false paradise's fragility is shattered by the breakdown of established order. Tensions and hysteria all surface in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the affluent Victorian European life style in an alien land, exposing the suppressed passions that are the reality of life. This theme is further expressed by the virginal white dresses worn for the picnic, which seem out of place in this environment and represent the stifling restrictions placed on the young women. The layers of dress and petticoats the girls have to wear, combined with the various shots into mirrors, as if into another dimension, also reflect the story's many strands.
Russell Boyd's award winning cinematography is stunning and actively encourages you to feel the summer heat. The beauty of the actors and the sounds of the Australian bush, under the sinisterly foreboding gaze of the Rock, with its blatant phallic symbolism, seduce you so that you will more feel a sense of the horror, as does the galumphing Edith (Christine Schuler). The flashback at the end, poignantly coupled with the adagio from Beethoven's piano concerto No. 5 (Emperor), leaves you with a sense of loss of youth and virtue, an impression recreated by Weir in the final scene of his equally outstanding Australian feature `Gallipoli'. I am also reminded of the effect produced by Jane Campion (`The Piano') in her early work `Two Friends', where the tale ends in the past when the friendship is at its closest, making the passing of innocence feel more painful with ageing and the passage of time.
Cliff Green's script complements Joan Lindsay's narrative exceedingly well, although dialogue is often replaced by visual impression and unnecessary details are excluded to maintain the sense of mystery the author intended. The novel's literary solecism, concerning Felicia Hemanes' famous Victorian recital piece honouring the Battle of the Nile, is repeated, which is actually `Casabianca' and not Henry Longfellow's `The Wreck of the Hesperus'. Mrs Appleyard (Rachel Robert's fantastically monstrous harridan, who sadly shared her persona's fate only five years later) discriminates against Sara (Margaret Nelson's forlorn orphan in love with Miranda) who is kept back from the picnic for not learning the poem, whereas Irma's heiress, clearly unable on the Rock to quote more than two lines, is absolved. The housemaid, Minnie (Jacki Weaver), whose own sexuality is realised with the handyman, Tom (Tony Llewellyn-Jones), in stark contrast to the general ambience of repressed desire is one of the few who show Sara pity.
In basing her fictional account on Hanging Rock, a sacred Aboriginal site, near Mount Macedon in Victoria, Lindsay demonstrates Miranda's sentiment that "Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place". Aborigines believe time is not linear and Lady Lindsay eschewed the notion of man-made time, hence the title of her autobiography `Time Without Clocks'. To provide added authenticity Weir filmed during the same six weeks of summer at the actual Rock where both the watches of Ben Hussey (Martin Vaughan) and Greta McCraw (Vivean Gray) stopped at twelve o'clock. Unsportingly, the English change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752 with the loss of 11 days, doesn't offer an explanation for the alteration of 14 February 1900 from a Wednesday to a Saturday after correcting for the additional 29 February in 1800. However, rather than playing with time Lindsay confessed to having no care for the preciseness of dates, whilst the open-ended nature of the fable is a deliberate mirror of life where we may learn or uncover some secrets but never understand the mystery. Plenty of extraneous facts and unexplained details are related, such as the absence of scratches to Irma's bare feet, yet identical injuries appear on her head and Michael's (Dominic Guard), her joint rescuer with Albert (John Jarrett), all very redolent of the `X Files'.
The sympathetic direction draws out perfect performances from the exceptional cast in tune with the beautiful photography and the coetaneous haunting music of Bruce Smeaton and Gheorge Zamfir. The ever-excellent Helen Morse is an inspired choice as Mademoiselle Dianne de Poitiers, the French mistress and the girls' confidante, who describes Miranda as a Botticelli angel from the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, and Weir specifically uses the image of the Birth of Venus. In fact the three senior boarders who vanish; Miranda, Irma and Marion (Jane Vallis, who lamentably died from cancer in 1992), are evocative of the Three Graces who dance in attendance to Venus, in Sandro Botticelli's `La Primavera'. Lambert's portrayal of Miranda (an ironic reincarnation from her famed role in 1973 as the bed-hopping nymphomaniac in the Australian soap `Number 96') captures the vision perfectly with her ethereal loveliness and enigmatic smile, and is reminiscent of the knowing look on the death mask of the renowned `L'Inconnue de la Seine', who coincidentally died around 1900 in Paris.
Picnic at Hanging Rock's eerie power is such that the strange sense of loss it induces remains some 22 years after my initial viewing, proving itself a masterpiece of any time.
Russell Boyd's award winning cinematography is stunning and actively encourages you to feel the summer heat. The beauty of the actors and the sounds of the Australian bush, under the sinisterly foreboding gaze of the Rock, with its blatant phallic symbolism, seduce you so that you will more feel a sense of the horror, as does the galumphing Edith (Christine Schuler). The flashback at the end, poignantly coupled with the adagio from Beethoven's piano concerto No. 5 (Emperor), leaves you with a sense of loss of youth and virtue, an impression recreated by Weir in the final scene of his equally outstanding Australian feature `Gallipoli'. I am also reminded of the effect produced by Jane Campion (`The Piano') in her early work `Two Friends', where the tale ends in the past when the friendship is at its closest, making the passing of innocence feel more painful with ageing and the passage of time.
Cliff Green's script complements Joan Lindsay's narrative exceedingly well, although dialogue is often replaced by visual impression and unnecessary details are excluded to maintain the sense of mystery the author intended. The novel's literary solecism, concerning Felicia Hemanes' famous Victorian recital piece honouring the Battle of the Nile, is repeated, which is actually `Casabianca' and not Henry Longfellow's `The Wreck of the Hesperus'. Mrs Appleyard (Rachel Robert's fantastically monstrous harridan, who sadly shared her persona's fate only five years later) discriminates against Sara (Margaret Nelson's forlorn orphan in love with Miranda) who is kept back from the picnic for not learning the poem, whereas Irma's heiress, clearly unable on the Rock to quote more than two lines, is absolved. The housemaid, Minnie (Jacki Weaver), whose own sexuality is realised with the handyman, Tom (Tony Llewellyn-Jones), in stark contrast to the general ambience of repressed desire is one of the few who show Sara pity.
In basing her fictional account on Hanging Rock, a sacred Aboriginal site, near Mount Macedon in Victoria, Lindsay demonstrates Miranda's sentiment that "Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place". Aborigines believe time is not linear and Lady Lindsay eschewed the notion of man-made time, hence the title of her autobiography `Time Without Clocks'. To provide added authenticity Weir filmed during the same six weeks of summer at the actual Rock where both the watches of Ben Hussey (Martin Vaughan) and Greta McCraw (Vivean Gray) stopped at twelve o'clock. Unsportingly, the English change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752 with the loss of 11 days, doesn't offer an explanation for the alteration of 14 February 1900 from a Wednesday to a Saturday after correcting for the additional 29 February in 1800. However, rather than playing with time Lindsay confessed to having no care for the preciseness of dates, whilst the open-ended nature of the fable is a deliberate mirror of life where we may learn or uncover some secrets but never understand the mystery. Plenty of extraneous facts and unexplained details are related, such as the absence of scratches to Irma's bare feet, yet identical injuries appear on her head and Michael's (Dominic Guard), her joint rescuer with Albert (John Jarrett), all very redolent of the `X Files'.
The sympathetic direction draws out perfect performances from the exceptional cast in tune with the beautiful photography and the coetaneous haunting music of Bruce Smeaton and Gheorge Zamfir. The ever-excellent Helen Morse is an inspired choice as Mademoiselle Dianne de Poitiers, the French mistress and the girls' confidante, who describes Miranda as a Botticelli angel from the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, and Weir specifically uses the image of the Birth of Venus. In fact the three senior boarders who vanish; Miranda, Irma and Marion (Jane Vallis, who lamentably died from cancer in 1992), are evocative of the Three Graces who dance in attendance to Venus, in Sandro Botticelli's `La Primavera'. Lambert's portrayal of Miranda (an ironic reincarnation from her famed role in 1973 as the bed-hopping nymphomaniac in the Australian soap `Number 96') captures the vision perfectly with her ethereal loveliness and enigmatic smile, and is reminiscent of the knowing look on the death mask of the renowned `L'Inconnue de la Seine', who coincidentally died around 1900 in Paris.
Picnic at Hanging Rock's eerie power is such that the strange sense of loss it induces remains some 22 years after my initial viewing, proving itself a masterpiece of any time.