Word: weir
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK Directed by Peter Weir Screenplay by Cliff Green...
...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...
Picnic At Hanging Rock. Peter Weir's metaphysical mystery about the disappearance of several adolescent girls from a Victorian boarding school is often hilariously overdone, but the subject is eerie and the idea has potential. Weir is a wild Romantic, he gives every shot of nature stark religious overtones piled on to the point of silliness. The beginning is obvious but fun. There is no doubt as to what happens to the girls, but there follows more than an hour of ponderous, redundant "evidence," the result of an Agatha Christie-type structure which, Weir irritatingly enough, never fulfills. Weir...
...this tends to make the film increasingly silly. Weir gives up on making the characters anything more than symbols, points on the line between evil white and primitive good. A few scenes of the ghetto in which the Aborigines live are lifeless, the city has no character, and the film disintegrates into stock effects. Chamberlain discovers a secret Aborigine city beneath Sydney, and learns that an ancient white civilization was destroyed by a giant tidal wave, and that another one is due very soon. Some sort of eternal justice will destroy the white man's injustice. At the very...
...WEIR SEEMS TO THINK that this quick view of the apocalypse is enough to have an impact. But aside from the fact that one never sees the wave hit Sydney, the reasons given for its appearance aren't too terribly plausible. There is a magnificent scene which sets up the wave, the highpoint of the film: Chamberlain is in his car and daydreams that the wave has hit and as he looks outside he sees well-dressed pedestrians floating beneath the blue-gray water, groceries floating slowly upwards. But this scene occurs three-quarters of the way through the movie...