Another Picnic

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It’s curious, the desire to see a movie based on a novel you’ve already read.  I was intrigued to see how Peter Weir might handle Picnic at Hanging Rock.  As my post about the novel points out, the book, as it stands, is ambiguous about what happens to the missing girls.  It was only as I saw the film that I realized just how complex a story was crammed into a relatively brief novel.  Film directors have to make choices and although this one follows the book to quite a large extent, some elements were more clearly implied in the cinematic version.  The suspicion on Michael Fitzhubert was clearer, as was the fear that the girls had been molested.  The character of Mrs. Appleyard, although not exactly kind, is treated somewhat sympathetically.  It’s not implied that she might’ve killed Sara, for example.  Her treatment of the orphan, however, does lead to suicide.

This story isn’t simple to untangle even in the book.  Being literature, it isn’t clear exactly what is happening throughout.  It allows for ambiguity.  The novel never explains how the girls went missing or what happened to them.  Hanging Rock is presented as mysterious, almost a portal.  One way the movie deals with this is by invoking Poe.  It begins with a voiceover reading “Dream within a Dream.”  Indeed, the movie is shot with a dream-like quality.  The roles of the male characters is, appropriately, understated.  The story is about women and coming of age.  It’s often considered an example of dark academia.  Appleyard College isn’t a school at which fair treatment is doled out and Miranda, the most accomplished student, is compared to an angel, adding to the dreamlike quality of it all.

Using Poe to frame a film may not be entirely fair.  It does signal the viewer that what follows may or may not be reality.  Although Wikipedia can’t be considered the final authority—anyone can edit it—it lists (as of this writing) the movie Picnic at Hanging Rock as an adaptation of Poe’s famous poem.  Maybe by implication, but the story is clearly that of Joan Lindsay’s novel.  She presented this, in the sixties, as an account of an actual event, which it is not.  I found it interesting that dialogue was added to the film that doesn’t appear in the novel.  Overall, however, this seems to work as an art film.  The movie has been hailed as the greatest Australian movie of all time, and just this year was rereleased in theaters.  I’m glad to have seen it, but remain curious.

No Ordinary Picnic

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I will be including spoilers in this review, so please be advised!  Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is a novel that began as speculative but then turned naturalistic.  Mostly, anyway.  Born in 1896, Lindsay published the novel just after she turned 70.  Since she was Australian, it stands to reason that the story is set there.  Hanging Rock is an actual place and, according to multiple sources, Lindsay ended the book with a speculative chapter that explained the mystery.  What is the mystery?  On Valentines Day 1900, the girls at Appleyard College set out for a picnic at, well, Hanging Rock.  While there, three of the girls and one of their chaperones disappear.  Since everyone travels by literal horse power, getting back and forth from the scene of the mystery takes hours.  The head mistress of the college is frantic, mostly because she’ll be losing tuition because of this.

Eventually one of the girls is found, somewhat mystically, by a young Englishman with whom a romance starts and seems to end abruptly.  The found girl remembers nothing of what happened that day.  Further investigations are held, but the mystery is never solved.  Meanwhile, Mrs. Appleyard, the mistress of the college, takes a strong dislike to one of the girls who was devoted to one of the missing.  After one of the girls’ governesses, recently dismissed, burns to death, the headmistress appears to have murdered the girl she disliked (or she fell/jumped from a window; the novel isn’t explicit on the point).  Mrs. Appleyard, realizing she is ruined, goes to Hanging Rock where she dies by suicide, throwing herself down the rocky side of the outcropping.  The speculative ending—no longer part of the novel—had the missing girls disappear into a kind of time warp.  Lindsay’s editor had her remove that chapter.

The novel became quite well known in Australia, and to the wider world when a movie was made from it.  The interesting thing is that the novel presents itself as describing factual events, like the Blair Witch Project.  This is so much the case that the rumor grew that the events really did happen.  A book was even written, suggesting a solution regarding what happened to the missing girls.  Had the excised chapter been published with the book, it would’ve been clear that this was a fictional tale.  Lindsay had a savvy editor, however.  Nothing sells like a dramatic story that readers believe to be true.  Witness The Amityville Horror.  Even though naturalistic, a bit of the speculative still hangs about the story, making for a good gothic novel without a firm resolution.