Once upon a time in Australia: Three schoolgirls and their teacher vanish in broad daylight while touring a prehistoric landscape. Peter Weir’s 1975 film “Picnic at Hanging Rock” epitomizes the idea of the quasi-supernatural “outback uncanny” — the incongruity of a decorous settler civilization on what appears to be an alien planet.
Based on the 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay that was inspired by a dream, “Picnic at Hanging Rock” is something of a national treasure, anointed the country’s greatest movie by the Australian Film Institute. A new 4K restoration of the 1998 director’s cut opens Friday at the IFC Center in Manhattan.
On Valentine’s 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’s pan flute fills the air.
“What we see and what we seem are but a dream — a dream within a dream,” the beautiful and beloved Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert), muses, loosely citing a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. Once the party reaches the Rock, time stands still … literally. Disregarding the orders of the school’s 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.
“Hanging Rock” has echoes of “L’Avventura” and “Psycho,” 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 — “both spooky and sexy,” Vincent Canby wrote in his 1979 New York Times review — and, like the Rock itself, has cast a resilient spell. The actress Chloë Sevigny has namechecked “Hanging Rock” 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 that in college, she “tried to make a satirical remake entitled ‘Lunchtime at Dangling Boulder.’”
Indeed, in 2018, “Picnic at Hanging Rock” was remade as a six-episode TV mini-series. “There is now some solemnly overheated melodrama involving sexual exploration and jealousy,” Mike Hale wrote in his Times review. Although less explicit, Weir’s 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.
Weir’s 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 “The Last Wave” (1977), an occult thriller released in the United States before “Hanging Rock.” Still, however invisible in the film, Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants cast a shadow on the picnic.
Their conspicuous absence may be the real disappearance at the heart of the tale.
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Opens Jan. 31 at IFC Center in Manhattan; ifccenter.com.