Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

Emperor, 2nd movement: The weak part between the hard parts, when you're vulnerable?

Weir occasionally does half-baked stuff, e.g. The Mosquito Coast, and this film is also not completely... complete.

I guess the documentary style and the lack of human interactions are strengths, allowing the film to breathe, but it's not as if no ideas would have been forced in.

And so... first the eruption-ejaculation allegory, then the girl saved by true love, although not necessarily for her in particular, and finally Beethoven(!) as a symbol for order as opposed to the unsettling music of the unregulated wilderness.

Now, this last idea doesn't really work and less insistence on it would have felt more mature. The problem isn't primarily Beethoven's inherent unwordliness, although it does create a bit of a problem when his music is used to say that you're being taken care of, while Beethoven always screams that he's standing on a rock, where it doesn't matter what happens to him, no, the primary problem is that the wilderness doesn't feel anywhere near as unsettling as the music that is being associated with it.

It would be alright, if one could listen to that music and think of the danger that a girl on the verge of womanhood is in without dragging Hanging Rock into it, but that's of course what Weir does and it's hard to ignore it - it just disturbs the apperception.

No, that place is clean and no talk of snakes can change that. In a film with so little material one has to be delicate. I mean, something should capture your attention, and that little something should be flawless.

Speaking of which, the life saved by a life staked part was flawless, but the forced phallus associations before that were also a bit heavy-handed: at first rather mindlessly pushed and afterwards dropped and forgotten.

Dropped and forgotten... that also happened to the second idea. And the one idea that was consistently upheld didn't really work. Half-baked. I should have made that sentiment sufficiently clear now.

Good, I liked those unbearable poems, just like it is, telling yourself where the other side of the chasm is, I didn't like the acting very much, only the guy who reminded me of Madox in The English Patient could act (of those who had bigger roles), I liked the music as such, even more than just that, and I got what Weir was saying about pliability and stiffness and what looks only superficially opposite to that what Tarkovsky was reciting in Stalker.

Overall still a good film, nevermind the rookidom.

P.S. The likely course of the historical events is of course that the girl, who was found alive a week later, was involved in the killing of the other two girls and that the teacher was killed, when she discovered their bodies.  The dumpy girl either knew and kept quite or she was an outright accomplice. The condition of the surviving girl's hands would suggest that she used them for digging, which would also explain, why she removed her corset, parts of her clothes she buried to make the events appear more mysterious.

Then, later, Sara must have gotten wind of what occurred, possibly told by the dumpy girl or the killer boasted, and told the principal, and consequently both of them were murdered.

It's hard to conceive of another plausible course of events and instead of being filled with sisterly love those girls were probably devoured by envy and jealousy. This should perhaps be said in order to placate the souls of the murdered, but Peter Weir had of course the liberty to make his film like he did.