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Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
A Great Portrait
Unlike many other films - thrillers, comedies, dramas and adventures - that tell of an escape and a liberation, which inevitably always amounts to a story about a (different) deal with life or simply a reckoning, Picnic at Hanging Rock tells a story made up of close-ups of various details in a single photograph, the image of an immediate big emotion.
From Appleyard College, a boarding school for young ladies where the impetuous power of youth is supposed to cool down into solid forms, the St. Valentine's Day excursion goes to the "still relatively young rock formations" of volcanic origin of Hanging Rock, where time has stopped and in the midday heat of that 1900s afternoon this great emotion awakens.
The unheard-of disappearance of some of the excursionists in the aftermath - those epitomes of beauty, inquisitiveness, and a philosophically scientific way of thinking at the college - throws the community into turmoil and the institution into increasing trouble. What happened to the missing remains a mystery. The only dead woman, a young rebel, is found not at Hanging Rock but as if plunged from the sky among the plants in the college's greenhouse.
An excellent film adaptation of a timeless story about escaping the torpor of convention and the loss that this torpor brings.
A 1976 film like a photograph of a great emotion captured in 1900, that is definitely worth watching again. After all, beauty, inquisitiveness and philosophical scientific thinking still disappear in unexplained ways daily at our "Hanging Rocks", while the dead rebels pile up in our greenhouses.