Roger Durrant

Some ideas from just having watched  a masterpiece. It's thirty years since I'd seen Picnic At Hanging Rock and I'd forgotten what a mesmerising experience it is.  Peter Weirs' films were always mystical but no film I have ever seen can show so little and suggest so much. The film starts in 1900 but the new century will bring no vitality, optimism and happiness. This is a film about one woman's kismet. Sara bookends the film. It is about her and the Picnic is no more to the film than a mocking reflection. When we first meet her the viewer is drawn to the idea that she is mute.  We don't yet know that even when she does speak no-one will ever listen.  Everything is just out of reach; from her poetry that nobody will ever hear (Mrs Appleby cuts her short after she attempts to read it aloud to her).  Her unseen benefactors never pay. Sara has a brother nearby that she never finds.  The slight curl of her lip in a smile when she decides to commit suicide is again subtle.  Unseen of course like the rest of her life.  Not for nothing does the film start with a quote from Lewis Carroll, the epitome of a man reaching out for something he could never find. The rock is the only solid, eternal character of the film. Timelessly mocking human frailty and malevolent destiny. Everything else is mist.   I suspect Weir was a Thomas Hardy fan. Just as Hardy's Tess leaves the earth by a distant flag hanging silently, so does Sara in her own suicide.  And symbolically she was never allowed to attend the picnic which lends the film its title.  Yet at the very end the last frame is of Miranda, lost to all but really vicariously doomed through Sara's love for her.  Everything that Sara touches must perish.  Her love for Miranda, Mrs Appleby's guilt-ridden suicide on the Rock, the other "masculine minded" character Miss McCraw - Mrs Appleby's quote.  The torn fragment of dress is of course never matched to any girl.  Miranda's?  We can guess but of course that will always be out of reach. We hear torn fragments of Beethoven. We see a swan for a few seconds, the symbol of white chastity.  Sara will die a white clad virgin. Sara is metaphorically killed by the Rock and all who physically perish there do so through association with her. The last frame shows Miranda but we are seeing Sara's death as well. Absolutely magnificent. R