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New Statesman
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Picnic at Hanging Rock's vision of girlhood
Photo by GTO / Album - Image Once voted the best Australian film of all time, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir's 1975 film adaptation of the 1967 novel by Joan Lindsey, might seem, on the surface, an unconventional choice for a cinematic national treasure. Light on plot and vague in its explanations, it's a film of woozy, art-house strangeness. But the dream-like imagery and the mystery at its core cast a spell over viewers, and it became a key film of Australian New Wave cinema, helping drive forward a postwar cinematic boom. Fifty years on, both the novel and its cinematic sibling endure. Echoes of the film's distinct style can be found in everything from the films of Sofia Coppola to the fashion of Valentino, and even Gen Z's ultra-feminine 'coquette' fashion trend. Set in 1900 at an elite girls' boarding school in a remote corner of Australia, the story feels both specific and strangely timeless: a glimpse into a fleeting moment long gone, when Australia was still new to its colonisers and the larger world had so much to be discovered. Opening on Valentine's Day, the pupils at the school – an anachronistic, grand Victorian manor set in the outback – are dizzy with excitement at the prospect of a picnic on nearby natural monolith Hanging Rock. But this excitement is short-lived when three of the girls, and teacher Miss McCraw, mysteriously vanish while exploring. Though one, Irma, is later discovered alive by local boys Albert and Mike, their disappearances begin a chain of tragic events. Lindsay's book is brilliant in its weirdness. From the start, it envelops the reader with an all-knowing atmosphere of impending doom, inviting us to accept that there are mysteries we cannot comprehend. The film is one of those rare adaptations that remains uncannily faithful to the book, without being reductive. It's unusual to find the atmosphere of a novel captured onscreen; dialogue is lifted almost verbatim, and reading it after watching the film makes it difficult to entangle what has been seen, and what has been read on the page. It's only towards the end of the novel where book and film diverge, with the novel ramping up the tragedy and melodrama and pulling the threads of various subplots together. The film prefers to say less, to keep things simple. The 'exquisite languor' the novel describes, the textures on the page, translate perfectly to the screen – the film has lingered in our cultural imaginations in no small part due to its seductive aesthetic, its iconic visual language. The opening scenes are a riot of young girls lacing themselves into white corsets, surrounded by surfaces laden with trinkets. Miranda, one of the young women who goes missing, is described lovingly as a 'Botticelli angel'. They're almost smothered with girlish stuff – roses and cards and pressed flowers, all tastefully soft-lit. Yet under it all, there's a menacing sense of simmering passion. There's something febrile in the way the girls flock around each other, the unselfconsciousness with which tragic young orphan Sara Waybourne recites a love poem for Miranda. Modesty might dictate that they can only remove their gloves, due to the heat, once they've passed through the nearest town, but there's no placidity here, under the layers of frippery. Light floods every scene (until, in some of the grim final scenes, it doesn't). Golden and diffuse, deceptively gentle at times, it has a painterly quality. This isn't surprising, given the cinematography takes inspiration from the Australian impressionists of the late 1800s such as Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, who portrayed the same kinds of surroundings that the girls would have moved through in hazy, shimmering brushstrokes. Corsets and long skirts, stockings and boots are woefully inadequate for an Australian summer, but shots of the girls lounging on baking rocks, or half-hidden by luscious ferns, are visually startling and lovely as well as historically accurate. As in many of these pictures, the contrast between these artificial refinements, and the landscape they're placed in, is jarring. Beyond the school and the surroundings of the rock are lawn parties, where a band plays 'God Save the Queen' and the guests drink champagne. These colonial trappings seem more than faintly absurd in the arid and mysterious surroundings. Meanwhile, back at the rock they cut into a heart-shaped Valentine's Day cake that would seem more at home at a child's birthday party, iced exuberantly and bursting at the seams. It is soon forgotten, swarmed by ants. Symbolism like this abounds: nature, despite attempts to colonise and tame it, is full of mysteries we can't even imagine – and arrogance can only lead to a downfall. The strange mix of unfamiliar nature and beribboned girlhood, enchant and disorient viewers. The experience of watching it is easy to submit to, as the sounds and images wash over the audience. Dialogue is spoken as if characters are in a trance, or reciting a prophecy. 'What we see, and what we seem, is but a dream: a dream within a dream,' a languorous voiceover intones at the start. The fragile pan pipes of the soundtrack lull us further. But there's a hallucinogenic shift when the girls reach the rock – the music building, synths operatic and soaring, as they leave their recognisable world behind, and we are plunged into the realm of the unknowable for the rest of the film. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe This central unknowability is compelling: not just the mystery of the missing girls, but both the film and the novel's attempts to grapple with a larger sense of the incomprehensibility of nature's vastness, and our relative tininess within the universe. Time is so flimsy; throughout the film and the book, the stopping of clocks is a regular motif. Irma comments, dreamily, on how the faraway people on the ground look like 'ants' from their vantage point on the rock, and how 'a surprising number of human beings are without purpose'. Unfathomable patterns are set in place, they are merely pawns within them. But they don't seem to be alarmed; Miranda, the enigmatic centre of their group, even seems to be prepared for her fate somehow, hinting to Sara that she will be gone soon, and murmuring, on the rock itself, 'Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place.' Girlhood then, in the film, is both a place of innocence and a place of tragic possibility. I felt it too, as a teenager living with one foot in the day-to-day life of rural Wales, and another in a dreamy universe of my own making, of all-consuming friendships, albeit with diaries and mixtapes in place of the pressed flowers and Valentine's cards strewn around the opening scenes of the film. In fields and school corridors I was often bored, but sometimes had the eerie, prickly feeling that there was more to the universe than met the eye. The girls who go missing do not seem quite of this world, with the preternatural beauty of cherubim and their strange, distant statements on time and human nature. Maybe it is this which allows them to vanish into thin air, some kind of receptiveness to mysteries beyond human comprehension. But there's no escaping a more prosaic kind of girlhood, the trappings of their social status as elegant young women-in-training. The vanishings grip the community around the school because of the beauty and youth of the girls. When Irma is found, the doctor assures the adults that she is 'intact'; Mrs Appleyard is surprised at the vanishing of Miss McCraw, thinking her 'masculine intellect' would surely render her immune to any mysterious silliness. Such an environment of repression is a perfect setting for hysteria to take hold. Perhaps it's this acknowledgement of girlhood's complexity that appeals to young women more than anything else in the film. When Irma returns to say goodbye to her friends she isn't greeted with love, but with a sullenness that erupts into hysterical violence, the girls descending upon her as if to tear her to shreds. On one hand, girlhood is ribbons and ruffles. On the other it's viciousness and strangeness. It contains an energy, always under the surface, that can't be repressed forever. Anyone who's ever been a teenage girl, or met one, can attest to that. The tension bubbles throughout the novel and film, and finally breaks through, with devastating effects. With everything falling apart, the film that started drenched in such sunny radiance tips into pure nightmare. Hints of psychedelia become stronger and more twisted, the colours grow darker. Mrs Appleyard descends into her own vortex of cruelty and madness, and the sense of claustrophobia as things crumble spectacularly is all the more powerful given how happy the earlier scenes were. One of the final images of the film – Mrs Appleyard sitting dressed in a lavish funeral outfit, the photographic negative of the white lace gowns elsewhere in the film, manic eyes fixed on an indeterminate point ahead of her – is deeply unsettling. Like the ants devouring the cake, there's a nastiness under the surface niceness of civilisation. One way to keep people invested in a mystery, enchanted by it, is to keep it very much as a mystery – we never find out what happened to the girls, either in the film or in the original edition of the novel. When an 'excised' chapter offering concrete explanations was published in 1987, the reaction was largely negative (I've read it; I wouldn't recommend it). Rewatching it, I was reminded of how fervently readers on social media have taken to the novel I Who Have Never Known Men, another story without a neat conclusion, in which the appeal is in the untangling of the universe's mysteries rather than a neat plot. Narrative-wise, there's always something appealing about a mystery we can feverishly speculate over ourselves. Perhaps it's best to leave some of them unsolved, with the beauty being in what's unknown, and in the interpretations that spring up around them. [See also: There is no contemporary fiction] Related
The Australian
03-05-2025
- The Australian
Australia's darkest tourist spots: From Hanging Rock to Mount Sorrow
Some call it 'dark tourism'. American wit and travel author PJ O'Rourke dubbed it 'holidays in hell'. Visiting places of known calamity or disaster is, we're told, a niche travel trend. For vicarious thrills? Remorse? Historic reflection? Or simply, as someone put it, 'milking the macabre'? Australia offers a lighter side to deadly serious 'black-spot' travel. Stick a pin almost anywhere in the map and you're not far from a signpost saying Coffin Bay, Dead Cat Gully or Mount Misery. Some signs point to truly dark pasts, while the story behind others is closer to farce. Hanging Rock Victoria's own picnic portal to the Underworld. The legend of disappearing school girls, the novel and the famous 1975 Peter Weir movie have burned the ominous Mt Macedon outcrop known as Hanging Rock into the Australian nightmare. Don't be put off. Bring a picnic. Coffin Bay Nothing to do with the infamous 'coffin ships' of the Irish Famine era. Nor did the bay's namesake person sleep like Nosferatu in a pine box. Explorer Matthew Flinders named 'Coffin's Bay' on South Australia's Eyre Peninsula after his Royal Navy friend, Sir Isaac Coffin. Deadly good local oysters are now the big attraction. Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya It's the longest official place name in Australia and means 'Where the devil urinates'. Located in restricted Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara territory in far northwest South Australia, this alleged Satanic comfort stop is unlikely to receive many place-chasing pilgrims. Deadmans Reef 'Deadies', at the foot of Sydney's North Head, isn't on any official map. When huge winter swells roll in, the 7m waves that implode there attract a special breed of surfer, plus an awe-struck clifftop crowd gasping at every takeoff that ends in either triumph or annihilation. Mount Despair Victoria boasts a pair of Despairs. The smaller one, in the Yarra Ranges was named, it is said, by early surveyors who had to labour mightily to reach its summit. The other, a 1461m peak in the remote Alpine National Park can be seen on a 40km hiking circuit that includes the delights of Mount Buggery, Terrible Hollow and Horrible Gap. Mount Misery Misery clearly loves company. A scattering of disgruntled summits across the continent includes one serious, 1588m peak in the Victorian Alps. Most of the other Miserys don't even qualify, height-wise, as mountains. Queensland's collection features a morosely named rise in the otherwise celebrated Gold Coast hinterland, while Tasmania's sombre representative overlooks the scenic Huon River. South Australia's Mount Miz, in the Adelaide Hills, maintains the contradiction of uplifting views twinned with a sad-sack name-tag. Mount Disappointment This modest peak near the southern end of the Great Divide thwarted explorers Hume and Hovell as they battled its dense vegetation in 1824 hoping to sight distant Port Phillip Bay from the summit. Their payback to the mountain was an eternally gloomy toponym. Useless Loop This shallow bay near Steep Point, Australia's westernmost tip, was named by French navigator Louis de Freycinet in 1801. Realising its entrance was blocked by a sandbar, he charted the bay, perhaps with a petulant sniff, as Havre Inutile – Useless Harbour, which morphed into Useless Loop. Ironically, it is now the world's largest solar salt operation, annually producing a million tonnes of anything-but-useless high-grade salt. Foul Bay Ubiquitous place-namer Matthew Flinders explored South Australia's Yorke Peninsula in 1802. The pong of the bay's decomposing seaweed had him literally cry foul, thus overwriting the traditional Aboriginal name. In defiance of this alleged whiff of corruption, Foul Bay remains a popular fishing and camping spot. Lake Disappointment Now called Kumpupintil, this huge salt lake in Western Australia's Little Sandy Desert region was first visited by a European explorer in 1897. Expecting ample fresh water he found instead a salt lake, which he then named to reflect his disposition. Kumpupintil, an important site for the regional Martu people, is thought to be home to fearsome Ngayurnangalku spirits. Local avoidance taboos include flying over it. Mount Warning As he sailed up the east coast in 1770, James Cook logged many navigation hazards in order to alert later sailors. Avoiding the reefs north of Byron Bay, he charted a distinctive landmark, Wollumbin, as Mount Warning. Further on, near today's Coolangatta, he flagged Danger Reefs and Point Danger. Cape Tribulation Inevitably there was a reef even Cook couldn't avoid. 'Here began all our troubles,' he wrote when the Endeavour 'hit the bricks', a coral reef in Far North Queensland. He landmarked the nearby cape to commemorate the ship's tribulations. Later, having repaired the hull, Cook threaded the near impossible needle of the Great Barrier Reef system, escaping to the open sea. Mount Sorrow Cook named this peak just inland of Cape Trib, doubling down on this doleful episode. There are excellent views of the Daintree and reef from its 680m summit, but the 7km ascent is tough. Wanka Creek And worse. It's the 400kg bunyip in the mad top paddock of Australian cartography. You can't not mention the litany of Pythonesque place names strewn across the chart: Fiddletown, Humpybong, Bullshit Hill, Bumcooler Flat, Prickly Bottom and Big Dick Bore, plus an alarming list of 'Nobs', including Spanker, Scented, Prominent and Chinamans. Say no more. Poowong Sounds like? But doesn't smell like. The redolent name of Poowong village derives from an Aboriginal word meaning 'carrion' or 'decay', but there's nothing rotten today in the state of this South Gippsland dairy farming settlement established in 1874. Heartbreak Hill An unofficial name that's not so much spoken as gasped, Heartbreak Hill, midpoint on Sydney's 14km City2Surf running route, is a notorious, 2km grind from Rose Bay to Vaucluse. Last year 80,000 competitors laboured up it, enjoying – not – the spectacular harbour views. The borrowed name pays tribute to an even more punishing ascent on the Boston Marathon route. Linger and Die Hill The words were a grim admonition to bullockies and coach drivers urging their beasts of burden up this steep hill north of Stroud, NSW. So severe was the incline that if a wagon ground to a halt it was almost impossible to get it rolling again. History doesn't record the hill's alternative monikers as expressed in wagoner dialect of the day. Broke To borrow from a classic bushies' lament: 'Things are crook in Tallarook, but they're sick of the joke in Broke.' The 'joke' being that, at times, farming in this historic Hunter Valley region has been the perfect way to make a small fortune – presuming you started with a large one. The area was named by surveyor Thomas Mitchell to honour his friend, Sir Charles Broke-Vere. Fortunately, nominative determinism hasn't impeded its ability to produce quality wines. Tasmania Tasmania has more than its share of colonial-era dark sites and forlorn names, along with gallows humour. Among the vernacular inventions were Mount Mismanagement, Laughing Jack Lagoon and Mother Browns Bottom. Hells Gates Tasmania's gulag of outlier prisons built to torment the 'worst of the worst' convicts included the pitiless Sarah Island Penal Station. This west coast hell on Earth was located inside Macquarie Harbour, from which the only seaward exit is a treacherous channel known aptly as Hells Gates. Mount Horror The almost cinematic name refers principally to this northeast mountain's rugged terrain and scrub, although there are apocryphal rumours of escapee cannibalism. It has been dual-named as Konewongener. Dismal Swamp The Tarkine's Dismal Swamp, the largest sinkhole in the Southern Hemisphere, was named – they say – in 1828 by a peeved government surveyor who spent a wet and miserable night there attempting, as one does, to sleep in a tree. Suicide Bay Which rightfully should have been called Homicide Bay. Situated at Cape Grim, far northwest Tasmania, it is the site of an infamous massacre where 30 Aboriginal men were shot in a reprisal raid by early settlers. Now dual-named Taneneryouer. Break-Me-Neck Hill The name, or at least the fit-for-publication version, of this steep hill northeast of Hobart comes from the time when bullock drays and horse-drawn wagons struggled up this hazardous incline, which became even worse in bad weather. First cousin to another similarly challenging Vandemonian slope, Bust-Me-Gall Hill. Speckso Hill, Port Davey Unofficial title of the viewpoint where in 1949 legendary Tasmanian bushman Deny King proposed to his future wife. 'Will you marry me?' he said. Feigning reserve, she sighed: ' 'Spect so.' Overseas spots For 'dark tourists' on the path of the macabre, a world of mordant place names awaits, leavened by the occasional laugh. Haew Narok, Thailand Meaning Hell's Abyss, this waterfall in Khao Yai National Park north of Bangkok plunges 150m down a steaming jungle chasm. Local legends speak, of course, of demons in its depths. The blasting, triple-step cataract drenches onlookers with its spray. Hell was never so wet, nor water so welcome. Dead Woman's Pass, Peru Warmiwanusca, aka Dead Woman's Pass, is the highest point (4215m) on the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, as well as being midpoint on the classic four-day trek. Its profile resembles a supine woman – thus the name. The steep ascent and altitude sickness often result in trekkers sagging to a similarly supine position at the pass, usually temporarily. Hindu Kush, Afghanistan It means 'Hindu-killer' in Persian. This formidable mountain range stretching 800km east from Afghanistan earned its name, according to 14th-century adventurer Ibn Battuta, when Hindu slaves being taken to Muslim Central Asian markets often died on the arduous crossing. Cabo das Tormentos, South Africa Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias named the Cape of Torments (or Storms) in 1488 in recognition of the violent weather and currents he encountered at the foot of the African continent. Spin doctors soon rebadged it as Cabo da Boa Esperanca – the Cape of Good Hope. Costa da Morte, Spain This fog-shrouded Atlantic shore earned its name, the Coast of the Dead, due to countless shipwrecks. Local lore is rich with tales of drowned sailors haunting its cliffs. Regardless, if you see on a Spanish menu 'Goose-necked mussels from the Coast of the Dead', go ghoulish. Matamoros, Mexico A town on the Texas-Mexico border. The Spanish word Matamoros means 'Moor-slayer', referring to Santiago Matamoros – St James the Moor-Slayer – patron saint of Spain. The local town name, however, honours Mariano Matamoros, a hero of the Mexican War of Independence. Fugging, Austria Meet the Fockos. This small village in upper Austria dates to its sixth-century founder, Focko. In 2021 it changed its 1000-year-old name from to Fugging because for decades foreign tourists had repeatedly stolen the town sign, no matter how often it was replaced. Souvenir hunters still ask: 'Do you have any postcards?' If you love to travel, sign up to our free weekly Travel + Luxury newsletter here.
The Guardian
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Picnic at Hanging Rock at 50: how a low-budget whodunnit became a cultural juggernaut
Half a century after it landed in cinemas, the extent of Picnic at Hanging Rock's enduring legacy seems both astonishing and improbable. This half-a-million-dollar bush whodunnit, in which a group of schoolgirls and their teacher inexplicably disappear during an outing to Hanging Rock in central Victoria on Valentine's Day 1900, has managed to make its mark among fashion's foremost names, infiltrate the world of teen magazines, and run an implausible gamut of cinematic influence. Alexander McQueen riffed on it in 2005; 20 years later, brands like Zimmermann are still turning Picnic into runway fodder in Paris. Sofia Coppola referenced it twice, first for a Marc Jacobs ad, and then again for her gauzy, sexy remake of The Beguiled. Today the film counts a new demographic in its ever-growing fanbase: cosmopolitan 20-somethings. Last year Peter Weir attended a screening of Picnic at the Cinemathèque française in Paris; he believes about 80% of attendees were young people. As Picnic marks its 50th anniversary, feted with a 4K rerelease, the director has a few theories about why the film has proved so evergreen. 'Not only is the mystery at the heart of the film unsolved,' Weir says, 'but there is no message in the film. No lecture, no polemic. Picnic belongs to the viewer.' Others find the film's success a bit of a head-scratcher. 'I truly love all of Peter Weir's films,' says Jacki Weaver, who played Minnie, the sympathetic maid at exclusive all-girls' boarding school Appleyard College. 'But Picnic is probably my second least favourite. That it has achieved a place in the pantheon is a tribute to the film-making genius of Peter Weir – and a mystery to me.' Picnic's journey to the pantheon began with a conversation in early 1973. Children's TV host Patricia Lovell – an aspiring producer, and a one-time colleague of Weir – had read Joan Lindsay's ethereal, idiosyncratic 1967 novel and recognised its cinematic potential. She wanted to know if the director – only 28, and yet to helm a full-length feature – agreed. Three months later, Lovell and Weir were in Langwarrin, 50km south of Melbourne, staking their claim to Picnic in the author's living room. 'Joan's main concern was the ending,' says Weir. 'If I'd suggested we had to have a solution to the mystery of the girls' disappearance I would, politely, have been shown the door.' Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email Weir and Lovell's timing was perfect. By 1973 Australian film-makers had embraced the influence of 60s European art cinema, been liberated from the nation's tawdry history of cultural censorship, and were enjoying, for the first time, a suite of government-funded initiatives intended to revive the nation's moribund industry. The fruits of this era, dubbed the Australian New Wave, include The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Newsfront, My Brilliant Career and Breaker Morant. Picnic at Hanging Rock, filmed in just over a month in early 1975, arrived at the crest of this wave: a perfect convergence of the right people at the right point in their careers. At the time, then-Sydney film festival director David Stratton – who visited the set – wrote of the 'pervasive feeling among everyone concerned that something very special was in the making'. Kim Dalton, second AD on Picnic, remembers it similarly: 'Clearly it had a resonance, potentially a poetry, a narrative that lifted it above just the normal run-of-the-mill feature film,' he says. 'I think everybody felt that.' That Picnic still casts so potent a spell rests as much upon its ambiguous ending as its iconic, sumptuous aesthetic: frilled lace dresses, sheaths of summer bushland, beautiful girls captured with a halo of backlight in moods of gaiety and longing. A helping of Beethoven's Emperor concerto, as well as editor Max Lemon's penchant for artsy superimposition, elevates the film's haughty airs. Where early-70s Australian films leaned into the colourful, ribald and commercial, Picnic was the departure, a decisive charge towards art. Visual references include British photographer David Hamilton, as well as Botticelli's Renaissance masterpiece Primavera, Frederic Leighton's Flaming June and, of course, William Ford's At the Hanging Rock. Pop artist Martin Sharp, who'd made album covers for Cream and been tried for obscenity while editing countercultural magazine Oz, also happened to be the world's foremost expert on Joan Lindsay's book. Weir kept him on hand as the film's 'artistic adviser'. Weaver fondly recalls Weir's 'delicate aesthetic sensibilities'. 'Peter possesses a fine intellect,' she says. 'The soul of a poet.' Turning up each day in a straw hat and sandals, he liked playing background music to generate atmosphere on set. 'Peter's persona was absolutely in keeping with the mood of the film,' says Dalton. 'There was something slightly ethereal about him.' If Weir concocted the ethereal, it was Russell Boyd's job to capture it. His photography wrung a liquid lusciousness out of Australian light that has secured Picnic's hallowed place in the annals of Tumblr and Instagram film fandom. He shifted frame rates, draped silk sheets in the tree line, and shot the girls' final minutes of innocence with, yes, a wedding veil over the lens. Sometimes his brilliance bubbled up extemporaneously. When a generator went crashing down the slopes of the Rock, Boyd ad-libbed a bounce light with some sheets of polystyrene. ('The sort of thing you make coolers out of,' he would later recall.) Assisted by John Seale – who would later win an Oscar for shooting The English Patient – Boyd made working on the Rock look easy; in fact it was anything but. This, after all, wasn't an orderly film set but an ancient volcanic formation. Hanging Rock – or Ngannelong – had served as a site of ceremony for Wurundjeri, Taungurung, and Dja Dja Wurrung men for tens of thousands of years. Judith Dorsman, costume designer on Picnic, tells Guardian Australia of her almost sisyphean struggle to keep everything pristine while shooting in the bush. 'All those white gloves,' she recalls. 'We had six million pairs of white gloves. Everything was white. And you're on a rock. My God.' Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Production soon decamped to Martindale Hall, a Georgian villa nestled in South Australia's Clare Valley, doubling as Appleyard College. Graham Walker, prop guy on Picnic, had a mansion to dress and no money to dress it with. With charisma and knack for improvisation, he made do. 'I'd find places, hire, buy, steal, borrow and get it back, all out of a Volkswagen Kombi van,' he says. 'Later I'd have people ring saying, 'That bed we lent you – when are you bringing it back?'' 'It was a wonderful shoot,' says Weaver. 'Like a long summer camp.' For the producing team, however, it was less idyllic. A week from her first shooting day, Picnic's top-billing star, Oscar-winning British actor Vivian Merchant, told the team she had pneumonia and could no longer play headmistress Mrs Appleyard. In the scramble for a replacement, six actors were contacted; only Welsh Bafta-winner Rachel Roberts was available. 'She was, I think, a terrible shock to everybody,' Pat Lovell told Cinema Papers in 1976, 'because I don't quite know whether the McElroys [the film's producers, Hal and Jim McElroy] or Peter realised how powerful an actress she was.' Powerful is putting it mildly. Her performance – intricate down to the alveolar trills – lends this rough-hewn bush flick its true star quality. But Roberts, a longtime alcoholic, managed to make some equally spectacular drama off screen. One night during the shoot, according to a 2004 documentary, she ran out of her motel room naked, hooting and yelling in the courtyard, as cast and crew watched on with bemusement. On other days, Guardian Australia was told, she could barely leave her motel room. Yet she was, beneath it all, a thespian to the bone: as Weir said in February, Roberts even refused to wear the wig made for Merchant because, in the traditions of the English theatre, it was not the done thing. 'Fame has to be left on the outskirts of the set,' says Weir. 'Once an actor crosses into that magic circle they have a job to do. The best, like Rachel, understand this.' At the time of its release, Picnic was the most seen and best reviewed Australian film to date. Its months-long run in domestic cinemas saw it gross $1.5m by March 1976. No Australian film had felt so consequential. 'Picnic was the first Australian film of that generation that was a serious film and an enormous success,' says Stratton. He remembers people seeing it 'again and again because they were trying to work out what happened'. Although US distributors didn't pick up on Picnic until 1979, it had by then broken into several far-flung markets. Audiences admired it at Cannes and in Canada; the Italians gave it a baroque poster and retitled it Il lungo pomeriggio di morte – The Long Afternoon of Death. The costume designer, Judith Dorsman, recalls how in the years after Picnic's release, its famed dresses were 'all hired out to girls to wear for weddings when they got married. They were worn to death. Every man and his dog got married in them'. The only one who didn't go for it, apparently, was Joan Lindsay. Speaking to Film Quarterly in 1980, Weir recalled that Lindsay had 'considerable reservations' about the film upon its release. 'You've changed the tone,' she told him. 'I didn't write it with that kind of feeling.' Weir's film is a haunted repertory of beautiful dreams, heraldic visions, memories gained and lost. If Lindsay had ensured her ambiguous ending would be respected, she could do nothing to prevent a cast and crew of great artists from feeling their way into the gaps of her story. The result was an art film with an Australian touch, ever beguiling all these years later – a film which, after five decades, still belongs to its viewers. The new 4K digital restoration of Picnic at Hanging Rock is screening at Palace cinemas in Melbourne, Ballarat, Sydney, Brisbane, Byron Bay, Canberra and Perth from until 16 April.
Local France
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Local France
French actor Gérard Depardieu 'probed for tax fraud'
Depardieu, 76, already accused in a string of sexual assault and rape cases, is suspected of falsely declaring his tax residency to be in Belgium since 2013, the source said. A probe of his tax status, opened this month by financial crime prosecutors and now run by police, has involved raids in France and Belgium as well as police interviews, the source said. Depardieu is the highest-profile figure to face accusations in French cinema's version of the #MeToo movement. In October, a Paris court postponed his trial on sexual assault charges until March after his lawyer said the star was too ill to appear in court. He has denied any wrongdoing. Depardieu became a star in France from the 1980s with roles in The Last Metro, Police and Cyrano de Bergerac, before Peter Weir's Green Card also made him a Hollywood celebrity. He later acted in global productions including Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet, Ang Lee's Life of Pi and Netflix's Marseille series.
Yahoo
20-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Picnic at Hanging Rock review – Australian fever dream still dazzling 50 years on
Peter Weir's eerie and lugubrious mystery chiller from 1975, adapted by screenwriter Cliff Green from the novel by Joan Lindsay, is now rereleased for its 50th anniversary. It's a supernatural parable of imperial anxiety and sexual hysteria: the bizarre and unclassifiable story of three demure and porcelain-white schoolgirls and one teacher who on Valentine's Day 1900 – with the 19th century over and the Victorian age less than a year to run – simply vanish in the burning sun while on a picnic excursion to the forbiddingly vast monolith Hanging Rock in southern Australia. No one here uses the Indigenous name Ngannelong and the only Indigenous character is a tracker. They disappear while exploring its rugged forms and inlets, which weirdly resemble the faces of Easter Island statues. Like the Marabar Caves in Forster's A Passage to India, Hanging Rock is the centre of some unknowable enigma, almost audibly humming or throbbing with insects, a phenomenon that resists being subdued by the outsider's rational law. The film is a classic of the Australian new wave and, in its sun-stricken hallucinatory strangeness, one to put alongside Ted Kotcheff's Wake in Fright or Nic Roeg's Walkabout from 1971; it is a movie that influenced much later Australian films such as Greg McLean's Wolf Creek and Ray Lawrence's Jindabyne. It fascinatingly affects the mannerism of a true-crime cold case, but it is not based on anything from real life; author Joan Lindsay said it came to her in a dream. (A new biography of Lindsay points out that this great novel was not published until she was 71, after a lifetime of feeling marginalised and erased as a creative artist – another possible explanation for the vanishing.) Perhaps bizarrely, the obvious real-world point of reference occurred after both novel and film: the press paranoia surrounding the Chamberlain baby case in 1980, in which a two-month-old disappeared without trace while the family was on a camping holiday near the awe-inspiringly gigantic rock Uluru, and where the police and courts disbelieved the mother's (finally vindicated) claim that a dingo had taken her baby. (It was the subject of Fred Schepisi's film Evil Angels – AKA A Cry in the Dark – in 1988, with Meryl Streep.) Related: 'Clambering about in Victorian boots was brutal': how we made Picnic at Hanging Rock Rachel Roberts plays English headteacher Mrs Appleyard, a widow who is privately plagued by memories of summer holidays with her late husband in Bournemouth. She has permitted certain girls to go on a picnic to Hanging Rock, while those who have displeased her must stay on the school grounds. These dreamily sweet teenagers, longing for romance and love and nursing crushes on each other, are like the vestal virgins of some votive cult: the cult of Saint Valentine, in fact. There is something almost hypnotised in their behaviour, as if they know what is to happen, that they are to be secret sacrifices to a hidden god or be returned to their planet of origin. When the catastrophe is revealed, it convulses the school and the surrounding townships, disclosing a suppressed misery and fear, and simple exhaustion. Is it that the girls in their diaphanous white dresses represent the most vulnerable side of an effete colonial people, who are destined to evaporate in the heat and dust? Or that they represent a willed romantic self-immolation in the face of repression – a striking part of the case is that one missing girl is recovered, without her corsets. The film's mystery still shimmers. • Picnic at Hanging Rock is in UK and Irish cinemas from 21 February, and in Australian cinemas from 14 April.
