#29: Picnic at Hanging Rock
Hey loves,
Are you also living outside time this week? I AM. To be fair, I have for the past 9-ish months? But there’s somethin’ special about the yearly practice of liminal space wherein for a whole week we look at a lit-up-ass Christmas tree after the holiday is past and a literal new year is days away.
To be FAIR, and according to my mother, the Christian holiday of Christmas doesn’t technically end until January 6th, which is Epiphany, when the 3 wise men got a look at bb JC for the first time. So that is all to say, let it riiiiide.
#29: Picnic at Hanging Rock
Director: Peter Weir
Country: Australia
Year: 1975
Runtime: 107 minutes
Language: English
**As always, this post contains spoilers**
CW: Suicide, mention of sexual assault
This movie begins with a title card that reads:
On Saturday, 14th February, 1900, a party of schoolgirls from Appleyard College picnicked at Hanging Rock near Mt. Macedon in the state of Victoria.
During the afternoon, several members of the party disappeared without a trace….
YOU HAD ME AT 1900, BABE.
You also had me at telling me something bad is going to happen because I enjoy a partially predictable thrill.
At the Appleyard College, which is basically just a private school in a mansion on a large estate, teen girls do all sorts of turn-of-the-century quotidien shit. They wear white dressing gowns, wash their faces in a basin filled with an entire bouquet of flowers, brush their long silky hair, count Victorian valentines, press flowers, cinch each other’s corsets, and, my personal favorite: read poetry out loud, in the softest voice, at a window.
I cannot express to you how much I thought, as a child, that this is what adulthood would be like. I think because I watched and read a LOT of period dramas as a kid (Anne of Green Gables was my favorite) and not until I discovered the 90’s teen drama genre and realized Josh Hartnett lived in this current timeline, did I realize I had to move on. (Arrested Development-style V.O.: Stephanie never fully moved on.)
Also, the soundtrack of this film is almost entirely pan flute which I think you might think you know what a pan flute sounds like, but holy shit is it lovely. Josh had to break it to me that the flutist, Gheorghe Zamfir, had a burst of popularity in the 90s (?) so profound that he had his own infomercial. I am consistently amazed at some of the the things that take root in popular culture.
ALSO, this movie is based on a novel written by a lady, so I have high hopes!
OKAY, are you still with me? It’s 1900 in Australia, we’re at a private school for ladies, there are about 15 teens.
A student named Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert) tells her friend, Sara (Margaret Nelson), a fellow student and notable orphan, that she must stop loving her because she (Miranda) “won’t be here much longer.” Ominous!
I’m just gonna say it now, if you were hoping for a lesbian love storyline, I hate to disappoint: it remains vague the whole film. HowEVER there is a 2018 Picnic at Hanging Rock miniseries that is, apparently, quite queer.
Adding insult to injury, Sara is then told by one of the teachers, Miss Lumley (Kirsty Child), that the headmistress, Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts), won’t allow her to attend the St. Valentine celebratory picnic at Hanging Rock that day. Miss Lumley is also not allowed to attend for some reason.
This Mrs. Appleyard has an absolutely bonk hairstyle and a LOT of rules about the picnic: no “tomboyfoolery”, no removing of gloves until after they’re out of the city limits, and they will have to write an essay about Hanging Rock upon their return. A horse and buggy picks up all of the girls and two of their teachers: Miss McCraw (Vivean Gray) and a young, hot French teacher named Mademoiselle de Poitiers (Helen Morse).
On the ride, Miss McCraw tells them Hanging Rock is a former volcano that is 350 million years old. I’m going to show you a picture of this “geological formation” and also tell you I would describe it as a large rock, maybe a mountain.
Yeah?
Back at school, Mrs. Appleyard quizzes Sara, the orphan whom she held back, about poetry she was supposed to memorize. Sara wants to recite her own poetry instead, but Mrs. Appleyard INTERRUPTS HER and threatens her with an early bedtime. I have never read my poetry out loud to anyone on purpose and this is why. Someone could just do that!
At Hanging Rock, the girls are laying around, reciting poetry, looking at flowers, and eating cake.
The buggy driver, Mr. Hussey (Martin Vaughan), and Miss McCraw (the teacher) notice their watches stopped at noon. They chalk it up to something “magnetic.”
Four of the girls, Miranda, Marion (Jane Vallis), Irma (Karen Robson), and Edith (Christine Schuler), get permission to leave the group to explore the rock and “take measurements.” A young and fancy Englishman, Michael Fitzhubert (Dominic Guard), who’s visiting the rock with his aunt and uncle, and his valet, Albert (John Jarratt), watch the girls intently as they cross the creek.
The girls climb higher and higher, stopping when they near the top.
In the heat of the sun, Miranda, Marion, and Irma take off their shoes and stockings and walk a bit further toward the top as Edith follows.
They look out at the vista and Miranda says plaintively, “Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place.” The four of them lay down and fall asleep.
At the base of the rock, their teacher, Miss McCraw, looks up.
The girls wake up and Miranda, Marion, and Irma, as though in a trance, walk into a crevice in the rock as Edith calls out for Miranda.
She doesn’t follow them, but instead runs back down the rock, screaming.
The whole group of extremely frazzled and upset girls return to school very late to a v pissy Mrs. Appleyard. Sara, who was left behind in her long brown hair and long white dressing gown, is mournful as she realizes Miranda hasn’t returned. The driver explains to Mrs. Appleyard that Miss McCraw, Miranda, Marion, and Irma have gone missing at the rock. Sgt. Bumpher (Wyn Roberts) and Constable Jones (Garry McDonald) are assigned the case.
Sgt. Bumpher casually questions Michael Fitzhubert, the young man who watched the girls at the rock. Unfortunately, he can’t really tell them anything except to describe Edith as “dumpy.” Thanks for nothin’, ding dong.
The police take Edith back to the scene where she recalls seeing a “red cloud” AND Miss McCraw on her screaming descent. Apparently Miss McCraw was on her way up the rock, but without a skirt, wearing only her pantaloons. Everyone is DISTURBED by this.
Later, at a garden party, Michael tells Albert he can’t sleep and can’t stop thinking about the missing girls. He’s become obsessed with solving it. He invites Albert to go back to the rock to look for them and although Albert thinks they’re probably dead by now, he agrees.
After searching all day with no trace of the girls, Michael decides to stay overnight. Albert tells him he’s crazy and leaves him behind. As he ascends the rock and searches that night and the next day, Michael leaves a paper trail. This is not an idiom. He literally just sticks pieces of paper on the ends of tree branches.
At the same spot where the girls were last seen, Michael falls into a dreamlike state under the sun. We hear the girls talking. He wakes up and climbs even further up the rock, yelling Miranda’s name, approaching the crevice the girls walked into. Albert, because he is a good friend, goes looking for Michael, and finds his paper trail. When he finds Michael, he’s catatonic and shivering, sitting at the entrance of the crevice. As Michael is rescued, he hands Albert a small piece of white lace, presumably from one of the girls’ dresses (!!!). Albert, because he is also a scampy adventurer, returns to Hanging Rock.
And guess WHAT.
There he finds an alive, but unconscious, Irma, one of the four missing girls. Although the rest of the girls are obviously thrilled, Mrs. Appleyard is NOT pleased, because several parents have withdrawn their children from the school because of the scandal. I sense a very precise hairdo about to romantically come undone...
For some reason that is unclear to me, Irma recovers at Michael’s uncle’s home, Col. Fitzhubert. The doctor says Irma is totally fine except for dehydration, cuts on her hands, and broken fingernails. It is also worth noting the doctors who inspected Edith and Irma made a point to declare they were “intact,” meaning they weren’t sexually abused in any way. There are no clues as to what happened to Irma at the rock.
A maid at the Fitzhubert residence tells the lady of the house that Irma’s corset is missing but doesn’t know if it’s important enough to mention to the Sgt. Hmmm yes. If you see something, say something!! A missing corset back then was basically like missing a couple of teeth.
Mrs. Appleyard tells Sara that her guardian has not paid her tuition in 6 months and that she will likely have to leave the school. I wanna know why Mrs. Appleyard hates this poor girl so much! Later that night, Sara tells the school’s maid, Minnie (Jacki Weaver), she used to live in an orphanage with her brother, Bertie, and they made her shave her head and it just overall sucked real bad.
After Irma fully recovers, she tearfully recounts to her teacher, Mlle. de Poitiers, that she can’t remember anything about what happened at the rock.
Back at the school, Sara has made a shrine for Miranda.
Mlle. de Poitiers sees it and tells her Miranda might not come back. Sara tells her Miranda knew all sorts of things other people didn’t know, such as knowing she wouldn’t come back. HMMMMMM.
Irma, dressed in an incredible red velvet cape and hat, visits her classmates at ballet class one last time before she leaves to join her parents in Europe.
They stare at her in silence for a solid 15 seconds before violently attacking her, demanding she tell them what happened at the rock. Everyone leaves crying, except Sara, who is tied to a board on the wall to “correct her posture.” Jesus!
Miss Lumley, the teacher who stayed behind the day of the picnic, tells Mrs. Appleyard, who’s drunk and who’s hair is coming undone (called it!), that she is resigning. Mrs. Appleyard then promptly goes and tells Sara that she will be returned to the orphanage when everyone else leaves on holiday.
The next morning, Albert tells Michael he had a dream that his long lost sister, Sara, who he hadn’t seen since they were both at the orphanage, came to visit him before she had to go. This is a very sad reveal because they were right under each other’s noses the whole time.
Mrs. Appleyard tells Mlle. de Poitiers that Sara was picked up by her guardian, Mr. Cosgrove early that morning. THE LIE DETECTOR TEST DETERMINED THIS WAS A LIE because…
Sara is found dead from an apparent suicide in the greenhouse. As though this weren’t suspicious enough, when the gardener comes to tell Mrs. Appleyard about Sara’s death, she is sitting at her desk, already dressed in her black mourning outfit.
A voiceover tells us Mrs. Appleyard’s body was found, soon after, at the bottom of Hanging Rock, from an apparent fall.
Miranda, Marion, and Miss McCraw’s disappearance remains a mystery.
THE END.
Standing O. Loved it.
I usually don’t love an unsolved mystery but the unsolved mystery is the whole point. The movie is definitely making a comment on sexuality (though I don’t know what, exactly?) and, I think, class is being interrogated a little bit. But what I took away from it most is pretty straightforward: colonizers beware.
I think there’s something going on at Hanging Rock that those who first lived on the land likely knew about. Whether it be supernatural or just natural, it is a danger that the colonizers never learned about because, historically, what do they care? And the arrogance of the girls freely traversing this very enormous, very old, very powerful and mysterious geological formation, cost them their lives. Nature, notably Australian nature, does it’s thing. It doesn’t care if it’s St. Valentine’s day and you’re a richie from a private school nearby.
This might explain why Sara was initially spared: she was not a richie, but an impoverished orphan, who probably would’ve followed Miranda into the crevice because she loved her. She was later killed by Mrs. Appleyard, but Mrs. Appleyard was a chaotic woman operating outside “nature,” who was possessed by her own egotistical rules and reputation. I don’t believe she literally pushed Sara out of the window, btw, but she knew Sara would take her own life, and knowing she herself would die by suicide at the rock in the coming weeks, she had to clean house. Every other girl at the school could go home to their families except Sara. I think in some ways Mrs. Appleyard felt she was sparing her from a life at an orphanage, a fate that, for Sara, would have been worse than death.
Possible moral of the story: listen to the land. It knows more about “truth” than we ever possibly could, because it is, if you ask me, the most perfect expression of it. The challenge and the fun, of course, of being human is trying to figure it all out and make art and tell stories about it. But in the pursuit of truth, we cannot run roughshod over it, staking our claim in every crevice.
Also, minor note: because a pan flute is a huge part of the viewing experience, I do not suggest watching this movie if you are already sleepy. Also, major note: I have downloaded every Gheorghe Zamfir album in existence (may I recommend Music From the Movies ?) and it is my newest comfort object.
Onward and upward friends! Every week we are further from Blood for Dracula and closer to Armageddon. Next up is M, a German thriller from 1931. Eep!
See you in 2021!
XOXO,
Steph
If you’d like to subscribe to this newsletter, you may do so here!