Vanishing Point

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK Directed by Peter Weir Screenplay by Cliff Green

As a special treat, the young ladies of Appleyard College (it is really just a finishing school for adolescents) are to be taken on an educational outing to the base of Hanging Rock, a massive formation. The precise pedagogic function of this venture is unclear-something about appreciating more fully the depths of geologic time, perhaps the mystery of Hanging Rock's origins in violent tectonic chaos.

About this the girls are quite unconcerned. The trip represents a day away from the stultifying routine that has turned them into twittering caged birds. Even as they leave for their picnic, they are instructed not to remove their white gloves until they have safely passed through a neighboring town. There will of course be no question of disencumbering themselves from all their heavy corsetry. The time is 1900, and the place is provincial Australia; the most repressive tenets of the Victorian behavioral code, especially regarding sexuality, are rigidly enforced.

The brooding rock exerts a primitive magnetic force on some of the girls. Four, led by the lovely Miranda (Anne Lambert), leave the group to explore it more closely. One, chubby and asexual, turns back, but the other three press on. Two of them (along with a teacher answering some mysterious impulse to join them) are never seen again. One girl is rescued some days later but never speaks about what may or may not have happened on Hanging Rock. Nor does the film, based on a thriller by Joan Lindsay, offer any definite explanation. It does explore the rational efforts to solve the mystery (two young men who were near by seem likely suspects at first), and it examines how the tragedy affects the various interested parties in the aftermath.

It could be objected that this failure to come up with a realistic denouement is a fault, but it is one that the film shares with works like L'Avventura and Blow-Up, whose director, Michelangelo Antonioni, has obviously had an influence on Peter Weir. As in the master's work, the criminal, if there is one, is society. It does not matter to Weir whether there was a sexual criminal lurking up there among the rocks, awaiting these young women who are easy prey, or if their own erotic repression led to some self-destructive hysterical act. The point is that the repression existed, and that it was not created by its victims.

There is something else Weir wants to say-that in society, a sense of order is a very fragile thing. If people do not allow for the inexplicable, then they will collapse of shock when chance makes its inevitable appearance. That is what happens to Mrs. Appleyard, the school's headmistress (Rachel Roberts), and to the little academic world she has created, when the full import of the picnic strikes her. The suicide of a girl who had a crush on one of the victims is the final blow.

This horrific tale is told with marvelous shadowy indirection and delicate lyricism. It is full of enigmatic silences, which create a nice, ironic tension between the film's genteel manner and its really quite ferocious theme. It may be seen as a mature exercise in style by a young director, if for no other reason. In addition, it is the centerpiece, so far, of the revitalized Australian film industry and the first assured work by a director who could gain an international reputation. -Richard Schickel

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