Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), directed by Peter Weir, opens like a Valentine from 1900 (the year the story takes place).  The young girls at Appleyard School are sharing a languid afternoon of lace and sappy poetry.  They celebrate Valentine’s Day the only way their sequestered lives provide, by giving each other love in the form of sentimental cards.  The Mary Cassatt images in these first scenes establish for the audience that these girls are entering a confused adolescence after living in a cloistered environment for too many years.   Their secluded lives have left them blind to the natural inner urgings of budding sexuality, which the strict head mistress seeks to control.

    The pace of the film is as lackadaisical as life at Appleyard School.  Propriety is both the goal and the rule.  It imprisons these young ladies in a timeless room like the tight clothing and corsets that shape their changing lives and control their maturing bodies.   However, passion will have its release in one way or another.  Human nature is wild and untamable like the country that surrounds the school with dangerous snakes and insects.  These seemingly fragile girls hide a monstrous desire beneath their starched white conformity.  They are venturing into the perilous territory of uncontrollable desire represented by the rugged countryside at Hanging Rock.

    As they bump along in the carriage that takes them to their picnic, the girls gradually release the confines of their learned etiquette in the same fashion as they remove their gloves.  Their classes in ladylike behavior have ill-prepared them for what awaits.  Their only protection from the lusty scenery are their two teachers (themselves products of the times) and a hapless driver.  They are so absorbed in the illusion of safety their female roles provide that they disregard the obvious power of the place.

    As they approach Hanging Rock, Miss McGraw describes the origin of the rocky terrain (a lava bed formed by a volcanic eruption) with almost breathless sexual undertones.  She tells them with a display of outward scientific detachment that the eruption which created the rock took place millions of years ago.   Her description, however, hints at another sort of event that also seems to her to have happened millions of years before.  This repressed memory is offset by the response from one of the girls when she says that the place had been waiting all this time for them to arrive.

    There is something haunting and frightening about this rock.  The film emphasizes the feeling of magic and the supernatural that surrounds the events that will follow. The air is filled with the deep growling sound of thunder.  The camera lingers and slowly pans the Victorian images of the young ladies eating cake and drinking tea in the sublime landscape.  The soft focus of the lens holds a feminine quality that is in sharp contrast to the dangerous masculine forms that surround them.  The wild atmosphere betrays the seeming safety with shots of ants devouring pieces of lacy cake that have fallen to the ground.  The cake, like the girls themselves, is passively overtaken and consumed by nature.

    It is at this point that the driver and Miss McGraw notice that their watches have stopped at noon.  Time stands still.  It can no longer tolerate the pace and refuses to go on.  Something strange is about to happen.

    Four girls set out on a hike.  Their angelic innocence is punctuated by the French teacher’s realization that Miranda is like a Boticelli angel.  She compares Miranda with The Birth of Venus.  This painting is not only an image of the “birth” of the goddess of love, it symbolizes the transcendent quality of maturing youth that Miranda embodies.  Like the painting, Miranda is only to be viewed and admired from a distance.  She must allow the desire of the viewer (both male and female) without holding desire of her own.

    Two young men (Michael and Bertie) see the hikers as they cross a nearby stream.  The men are hidden from the young girls’ view, although Miranda seems to look right at them without seeing.  The unspoken mystery of womanhood that now affects these male voyeurs is shared between the men as they comment on this scene.   Bertie (who is obviously of lower class than Michael) verbalizes thoughts that Michael (who is properly Victorian) hides.  The vision of Miranda, however, will haunt Michael long after this brief look.

    The four girls reach the top of the rock and, in Sleeping Beauty fashion, fall into a mysterious sleep.  The audience now assumes the role of voyeur as our eyes are allowed to linger over the sleeping bodies.   When they awaken, three of the girls walk in zombie-like fashion deeper into the rock.  Two of them, sacrificed along with one of their teachers to the masculine domination of the territory, will never be seen again.

    One of the girls, Irma, is found unconscious a few days later by Michael who suspiciously returns to the rock to search for the missing girls and teacher.  The doctor and police chief later examine Irma as she lies in her bed recovering from the ordeal.  The social distance of their authority allows them to survey her body and remark about her injuries using terms like “the fingers,” “the hands,” “the feet” to further distance them.  They only succeed in objectifying her in similar (yet non-sexual) terms as Michael and Bertie did the day of the picnic.

    The disappearance of the girls and their teacher is not punishment but a preventative measure.  They must vanish from the world in order to put an abrupt and absolute end to their desires.  There is no place for them among “civilized” society.  By leaving the world, they stop time and thus retain forever their virginal qualities.  In the end, the film resurrects the lost girls in images of Miranda.  They will continue to exist just as they are in the memory of those left behind.

    The unanswered questions surrounding the disappearance of the two girls and their teacher are kept “in tact” throughout the film.  Like a true mystery, there are “some questions that don’t have answers.”  The audience is left as mystified by the disappearances as the characters in the film.  The repressive nature of the times will hold all clues and solutions forever.  We are sent out from the darkness of the theater to wonder about what happened just as those who participated in the event.  The film doesn’t solve the mystery for us.  It politely leaves us asking, “What was that all about?”