Peter Weir
Picnic a Hanging Rock

The pan flute of Gheorghe Zamfir sweetens and hypnotizes, framing the still wild land. Peter Weir is in his Australia, and in one of his early films, he faithfully captures it with beams of intense yet cold light.

Picnic at Hanging Rock seems to arise from a prolonged dream, from ancestral moods in the form of a gaseous and intangible cloud that envelops everything softly and softly suffocates it.

The fascination always exerted by the film, shot in 1975, arises from the meeting of the forests of the Oceanic hinterland, mystery, and the virginal-institutional whiteness of the human element: a group of teenagers, presumably from good families and of English origin: colonizers of a hypothetical future in an uncolonizable land, where every stone, every path, however defined, represents a sensory deviation, an opening towards the unknown.

The girls and their governess embark on a journey resembling a short excursion, but some of them, the clumsiest, the most beautiful, the most adventurous, wander away never to return.

The bond between some of the companions, seemingly fixed in bourgeois routine, consists of ecstatic pauses, delicate dialogues, and touches, with the camera fixed on capturing a hairstyle, following features, and engraving them in the visual field. In the discourse of the protagonists and in the rare but intense moments of opening towards comedy, the film is permeated by a languid aestheticism, enclosing within its exhausted and evanescent refinement the entire sound of an "other" nature. The sound expressed by the screeches of splendid and astringent captivity.

This early 20th-century tale seems to foreshadow, in its "non-original" screenplay and filming style, another faded and cruel fable: that of the Lisbon sisters, Seventies heroines of Sofia Coppola's debut The Virgin Suicides. But if Peter Weir's youth, so different from the masculine one immortalized in the lyrical Dead Poets Society (the original title, however, betrayed a vaguely funeral unease exploding in the resolution, referencing a Dead Poets Society), seems to delude us in its momentary opening to an archaic and intact festivity, Coppola's approach is different. The director seems to steal from Weir the milky grain and golden ridges, but the title is already a program of what will happen to Lux and her sisters, marked by the disease of bodies, the spirit plagued by contextual bigotry, and a subtle and crushing slavery to morality. The flesh hollowed by a kind of preventive cancer, the gazes overflowing with a creative and degenerative sensuality precisely because it cannot express itself, except in death.

Even Weir's schoolgirls, apparently joyful and innocent, conceal a more puerile and implicit restlessness, a frustrated desire to embrace nature and the irrational. Like the Lisbons, evocative even in name, they play with their image and expectations in confinement, forging an exclusive, morbid bond among them, which some have perhaps exaggeratedly compared to a form of "lesbianism" - spontaneous homoeroticism: see Vincenzo Patanè's essay regarding Sara's platonically intense love for Miranda, an iconic creature, and the vaguely epiphany-like temporal setting of the picnic: Valentine's Day of 1900.

What emerges, however, is the absolute skill in veiling all this, in deferring the certainty of the emotional abyss linked to the plot by alluding to it with small, intangible, aesthetic but also subtly psychological steps.

In the final part, introduced by a fluted enchantment plunging into the crevices, with angular shots and the vertigo of a bird of prey's perspective. The same enormous, wild bird caressing the eyes and curiosity of one of the girls. Three or four of them during a picnic climb onto a peculiarly shaped "rock". It is as if inexplicably the mystery tied to the exploration and disappearance of the students provides another with the pretext to enter the "horrific". A chubby girl struggles to climb, perhaps not even wanting to: the grace she desires for herself and in herself partly frightens her, animates suspicion in her. The diet-conscious and not spectators' eyes, blinded by the reflecting rock, search for the unutterable place where the girls disappeared. The door to the secret garden that seems not to be there, the dry mucosa in the seemingly hospitable body of unspoiled places.

It is in this way that the second encounter occurs: the structural one between the "beautiful" and the purest horror, the terrifying in the form of absolute irrationality. A compelling fairy tale force illustrates the tragedy with its invisible ogres, without showing us corpses, decaying flesh, or writing. The text remains as clear as the vision, immaculate and sunlit. No bloodstains, not even in the reconstruction of the event by those who remained "on this side". The epiphany is complete, in a celebration of wild naturalness opposed to bourgeois daily life, always alive but inevitably mortuary.

The neo-Renaissance pleasantness of those faces and minds during their formative process is denied by the director, here an "exorcist" of the adolescent season, of its disillusionment, of its intrinsic and intangible violence. The materialization-death is not just sublimation but the only possible expression of a fleeting mixture of nature and metaphysics, paradisiacal and demonic.