Picnic at Hanging Rock

Saw Picnic at Hanging Rock. It's one of those films about a mysterious disappearance. This time it's a period piece in which a small group of girls from a nearby boarding school vanish somewhere in Hanging Rock, a volcanic rock formation of twisting passages and towering pillars. The disappearance happens quite early on and is the culmination of a sequence of increasingly strange shots. The girls mumble half-intelligent statements while gazing out into the distance. Synthesizers swell on the soundtrack (a marked departure from the usual pastoral, classical music that forms the rest of the soundtrack.) As with other vanishing person films, the vanishing itself is merely the frame and the backstory to the actual plot which is the fallout of the vanishment.

The film is slow and calm. The girls are symbolically linked with swans, gliding calmly and serenely about, calm and beautiful and untouchable. The film is the same, drifting in either a lulling or maddening way, depending on your temperament. The mystery of the disappearance is all-consuming and all-destroying. One little English lord (he must be about 17) goes hunting for them and nearly dies in the process. His only prize: a scrap of lace. Everyone connected with the mystery ends up suffering.

I'm not sure what to make of this film. It's poetic, dramatic, unsettling, certainly not bad. It's very slow which I think hampered my enjoyment a bit, and it's a bit too in love with the beautiful, beautiful girls. The central struggle of the film really seems to be between the cruel headmistress of the girls' school and a roommate of one of the missing girls, but these seemed too straightforward and simple to me. The old battleaxe vs the sensitive soul? I wonder who wins. I can't really tell what the film was doing which is good, I think, but I also couldn't follow it and became confused and grumpy. Perhaps I'm just getting too old to accept the heavy theme of ambiguity in this film.