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Once upon a time in Australia: Three schoolgirls and their teacher vanish in broad daylight while touring a prehistoric landscape. Peter Weir\u2019s 1975 film \u201cPicnic at Hanging Rock\u201d epitomizes the idea of the quasi-supernatural \u201coutback uncanny\u201d \u2014 the incongruity of a decorous settler civilization on what appears to be an alien planet.<\/p>\n
Based on the 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay that was inspired by a dream, \u201cPicnic at Hanging Rock\u201d is something of a national treasure, anointed the country\u2019s greatest movie by the Australian Film Institute. A new 4K restoration of the 1998 director\u2019s cut opens Friday at the IFC Center in Manhattan<\/a>.<\/p>\n On Valentine\u2019s Day, 1900, the young ladies of Appleyard College, an exclusive finishing school well-stocked with Victorian knickknacks, flutter with anticipation at the prospect of a daylong excursion to Hanging Rock, a craggy volcanic formation in central Victoria dating to the Miocene epoch. Swans grace the pond, billets-doux circulate, the Romanian folk musician Gheorghe Zamfir\u2019s pan flute fills the air.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWhat we see and what we seem are but a dream \u2014 a dream within a dream,\u201d the beautiful and beloved Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert), muses, loosely citing a poem by Edgar Allan Poe<\/a>. Once the party reaches the Rock, time stands still \u2026 literally. Disregarding the orders of the school\u2019s dragonlike headmistress (Rachel Roberts), the young French teacher, Mademoiselle Dianne de Poitiers (Helen Morse), allows several of the girls to explore the forbidden geological formation, led by Miranda, whom Mademoiselle compares to a Botticelli angel. The afternoon passes, the girls do not return, even as the remaining classmates fall into a languorous erotic trance. The ensuing procedural scarcely demystifies the absence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHanging Rock\u201d has echoes of \u201cL\u2019Avventura\u201d and \u201cPsycho,\u201d two movies that create an existential void when a main character vanishes less than midway through. It is more genteel yet more erotically charged than either \u2014 \u201cboth spooky and sexy,\u201d Vincent Canby wrote in his 1979 New York Times review<\/a> \u2014 and, like the Rock itself, has cast a resilient spell. The actress Chlo\u00eb Sevigny has namechecked<\/a> \u201cHanging Rock\u201d as a favorite film. Sofia Coppola, whose movies are often set in hermetic worlds populated by privileged young women, seems to have been especially impressed. A less reverent fan, Lena Dunham, joked<\/a> that in college, she \u201ctried to make a satirical remake entitled \u2018Lunchtime at Dangling Boulder.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, in 2018, \u201cPicnic at Hanging Rock\u201d was remade as a six-episode TV mini-series. \u201cThere is now some solemnly overheated melodrama involving sexual exploration and jealousy,\u201d Mike Hale wrote in his Times review<\/a>. Although less explicit, Weir\u2019s film also ends with a melodramatic clutter of dreams, blurred photos, secret shrines, public freakouts, visions and suicides. A new mystical convergence is suggested and left hanging.<\/p>\n Weir\u2019s movie does not lack symbols and portents; none, however, allude to the Indigenous Australians who regarded the Rock as sacred and inhabited the area for thousands of years. As the Pied Piper of Hamelin was unpaid, their spirits are unappeased. Weir addressed this lack with \u201cThe Last Wave\u201d<\/a> (1977), an occult thriller released in the United States before \u201cHanging Rock.\u201d Still, however invisible in the film, Australia\u2019s Indigenous inhabitants cast a shadow on the picnic.<\/p>\n Their conspicuous absence may be the real disappearance at the heart of the tale.<\/p>\n Picnic at Hanging Rock<\/strong><\/p>\n Opens Jan. 31 at IFC Center in Manhattan; ifccenter.com.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n