PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK Movie Review

A school outing in 1900 to a mountainous outback region of Australia ends tragically when a schoolteacher and three young girls vanish without a trace. The eerie, early film by director Peter Weir (Witness, The Truman Show) is haunting, intriguing, and memorably unnerving—an achievement that is all the more formidable because so much of the film takes place in daylight-saturated, wide open spaces. Anne Lambert (Louise) is extremely photogenic—and suitably subdued—as one of the girls to disappear, but the entire cast is suitably stylized and appears vaguely possessed by unseen forces. Picnic at Hanging Rock was originally released in a form that Weir disapproved of, and in fact one entire sequence the director considered “unconvincing” was included anyway, casing the picture to, as Weir put it, “come to a dead stop.” Consequently, Weir reedited Picnic at Hanging Rock in 1998, creating new widescreen prints and remixing the soundtrack, the result being a nearly anomalous quirk in this era of reworked “director's cuts”: a film seven minutes shorter than the original. (It's slated for video release in early 1999). Russell Boyd's widescreen cinematography deserves to be seen in the letterboxed format. From the novel by Joan Lindsay.

NEXT STOP … The Last Wave, The Year of Living Dangerously, Outback

1975 (PG) 110m/C AU Margaret Nelson, Rachel Roberts, Dominic Guard, Helen Morse, Jacki Weaver, Vivean Gray, Anne Lambert; D: Peter Weir; C: Russell Boyd; M: Bruce Smeaton. VHS FCT