British
colonialism fades into obscurity like three schoolgirls, their flesh and blood
evaporating like the scintillation of a daydream. Peter Weir’s oblique
narrative becomes transcendental and dangerous in its mystic rhythms, a
magnetic force of frenetic urgency that subsumes all living creatures.
Appleyard College
is an English boarding school on the boundary of the Australian Outback, a
bastion of civilization taming the primitive wild, where the future meets the
rock of ageless past. Apropos for a country whose empire spread like an
infection, destroying and converting that which it didn't understand into
tempestuous Victorian principles. But Hanging Rock’s basalt pillars are
guardians of time, sentinels that have withstood a million storms and will outlast
the invaders…and the human race. On Valentine’s Day, a picnic at this monolith
turns seemingly to tragedy when three students and a teacher disappear and only
one is found alive, her elusive memory a figment of trauma where truth and
imagination become inseparable. Though the film invokes police procedural, the
story is not about the facts concerning the disappearances but in the
aftermath, the effects upon Mrs. Applegate and her students, the police, the
witnesses, and the community at large.
The mystery is
never explained so Weir is able to focus upon the people: Mrs. Appleyard and
her inability to cope with change, Sara and her lesbian infatuation with
Miranda (one of the girls who never returns), and Michael an innocent witness
who becomes obsessed with visions of the beautiful Miranda. This event has
profoundly altered their lives while it’s just another sensationalist exercise
in journalistic fashion for the rest of the world, human lives reprinted in ink
and cheap paper. The story could be a masquerade of the young woman’s role in
Victorian society, their sexuality repressed beneath binding corsets, behavior
redacted to exclude natural impulses. Weir shows the girls shedding shoes and
clothing, possibly morphing into or merging with the world around them, leaving
behind a static life of disregard. It is also a tragedy of class distinction
leading to self-destruction, as Sara jumps to her death because her benefactor
fails to pay the required fee for the school, already suffering the loss of her
best friend.
Mrs. Appleyard’s
biological clock stops ticking at Hanging Rock, not from some strange magnetic
pulse but from blunt force trauma.
Final Cut: (A)
