(Credit score: Picnic Productions)
Tue 14 February 2023 7:00, UK
Peter Weir’s Picnic at Striking Rock divided audiences upon its free up in 1975. For lots of, the director dedicated a cardinal sin through refusing to supply a solution to the thriller he had meticulously crafted over the movie’s one-hour and 45-minute runtime. Set in 1900, 3 schoolgirls and their instructor pass lacking right through a Valentine’s Day picnic within the warmth of Striking Rock, but the movie ends and not using a answer. In opposition to standard cinematic notions, we’re left to our personal gadgets to fill within the gaps, which, for lots of audience, is a irritating revel in.
But, that is what makes the film – a cornerstone of the Australian New Wave – so nice. Weir performs with the speculation of delusion and voyeurism exceptionally smartly through involving the target audience within the women’ disappearance. From the start of the movie, the digicam persistently invades the ladies’ personal spheres, with one of the crucial opening pictures depicting Miranda mendacity in mattress, shrouded in white, virginal materials. Quickly sufficient, we see the ladies getting able in white petticoats, washing their faces in the toilet, and pulling every different’s corsets tight. Even though this may seem to objectify the ladies, Weir’s male gaze is consciously hired to put across that the ladies are actually turning into items of male need, the travel to Striking Rock marking their shift from blameless schoolgirls to younger girls. The mysterious, evocative panorama of Striking Rock serves as a backdrop for the burgeoning sexual emotions rising within the women as their repressed interest takes cling.
Sexual metaphors are rife inside Weir’s narrative, from the sight of snakes skirting over dry rocks to the ladies’ ultimate sighting going on as they input a distinctly slim passage. Additionally, a thick air of anxiety is created through an ominous ranking, far-off screams, and the domineering Striking Rock panorama, dry and sizzling, evoking a necessity for satiation. Starting with the hole collection by which we see the dusty terrain, and proceeding as the ladies front room at the rocks within the solar, there may be an overt sense of uneasiness created through Weir’s voyeuristic lens, incessantly focusing his gaze at the huge rocks, which assert themselves over the ladies with a masculine high quality, as though possessing forbidden wisdom.
It’s this forbidden wisdom that the ladies pass searching for and inevitably lose themselves to. We don’t know why they disappear and the place they finally end up, however we will be able to handiest think they’ve been ‘tainted’ one way or the other or some other. Irma is among the handiest women to go back, not able to recall any of the occasions of her disappearance. But, she is proven in a crimson-coloured cape and hat, starkly contrasting the natural white outfits of her friends. This implies that she has attained some sexual wisdom that the others don’t seem to be but supplied to care for. The unexplainable is central to Picnic at Striking Rock, which morphs its idyllic-looking pastel-coloured delusion right into a nightmare of girlhood. Horror creeps in slowly – a knife stabs a heart-shaped cake, and bugs move slowly throughout surfaces. Weir juxtaposes a girlish, dream-like aesthetic with topics of burgeoning sexuality and the transition from youth into the sexual global, making it unsurprising that Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides bears a putting visible resemblance.
Picnic at Striking Rock is quietly terrifying, reckoning with probabilities quite than definitive solutions. Weir’s movie could be significantly much less captivating and potent if he printed the fates of the ladies. As an alternative, the target audience turns into in part accountable through being given the chance to undertaking their darkest and maximum unsettling ideas onto their fates. Weir’s voyeurism lets in the target audience to interact in delusion, and no matter we make a selection to consider took place to the ladies is the actual horror of gazing the movie.
Discussing the finishing, Weir printed: “My handiest concern was once whether or not an target audience would settle for such an outrageous concept. In my opinion, I at all times discovered it probably the most fulfilling and interesting facet of the movie. I typically in finding endings disappointing: they’re utterly unnatural. You might be growing existence at the display, and existence doesn’t have endings. It’s at all times shifting directly to one thing else, and there are at all times unexplained components.”
