Picnic at Hanging Rock

It's the turn of the century Australia. Mrs Hester Appleyard (Natalie Dormer) purchases a remote mansion turning it into a girls' school. Miranda Reid (Lily Sullivan) is a self-possessed student expected to learn refinement. She stabs a handsy soldier with a pitchfork. It's St. Valentine's Day 1900. The girls are off to picnic at Hanging Rock. As most nap, Miranda leads Irma Leopold, Marion Quade, and Edith Horton up the Rock. The girls and their teacher Miss McCraw go missing. Only Edith returns in a shocked state.

The 1975 film was a critical hit and is a real sign post in Australian cinema. It's a psycho-sexual drama in hormonal madness. The lack of a revelation only added to its unique dreamlike quality. This TV series does have some of that. The teen sexual drama is in full bloom. Dormer, Sullivan, and the girls are all great. The revelation is little Inez Currõ who delivers a dark innocent performance and fully owns her episode as the protagonist. One of the reasons why the film's confused nature works is that it made it into a dream. The TV series tries to have it both ways by diving into the characters' individual stories while keeping some of the dreamlike qualities. It doesn't work as well and revealing an ending may be its major flaw. It's confused without the enjoyment of the dream. It's analyzing the dream without making sense of it. This material may not be able to translate into something longer than a movie.

People may not be aware that the novel PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK is very short, just over 200 pages. It works ideally as a 2-hour film but to stretch it out into 6-hours results in a heavily padded and downright dull miniseries. In the first hour, the girls disappear and the filmmakers bungle this key scene. There's no set- up, no sense of dread, so the main focus of the entire project falls flat. And that's in the first hour! For the rest of the miniseries, the characters involved seem more concerned about the girl's school than Hanging Rock. We see the local community searching for the girls, but at the same time, backstories of pretty much every character are introduced. Episodes 3 and 4 add zero to the narrative and you can see the filmmakers are desperate to keep us engaged with some poorly staged jump scares: an animal nailed to the wall! A pile of maggots at one character's feet! But why? No explanation. This is a much harsher PICNIC than Peter Weir's classic film of 1975. At times, the miniseries comes across as LA RESIDENCIA (THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED), the 1970 shocker with Lili Palmer who stars as the headmistress of a nineteenth-century French boarding school for girls. Some girls are whipped, others are slapped...but it isn't until the 5th and 6th episodes that we're reminded girls went missing. Whatever happened to them? Parents come and remove their children from the school and there are more flashbacks and backstories. The women talk about being "free" but that's never explained either. The girls who vanish "take a vow"...to what end? Stretched to the breaking point to six hours, the miniseries tries to answer questions that are never asked and, worst of all, forgets that Hanging Rock is the center of the story, not the school house.

My only real qualms with this were the ending (which I can blame the original author for, rather than the series writers), the weird decision to make many of the characters bisexual, and the excessive dreamy scenes others mentioned with birds or blurry imagery meant to take up extra time. Aboriginal descendants were in the film (though that may not be historically accurate) and brought up frequently enough in regards to Hanging Rock that I thought they did a decent enough job to avoid complaints about that.

Other than that, without having seen the original version or reading the novel, I can say that this is a show worth watching, and I didn't regret it. I really liked nearly all of the female central characters, and thought they did superb acting jobs. I also thought the character development was pretty good, although it could have been a little better in regards to Sara, whose character was one of the best.

I really liked the theme of the show in regards to true freedom, and the idea that some birds just weren't meant to be caged.

On a side note, it's sad but interesting that Amazon won't allow anyone to review the show on their website as of 6/9/2018 due to negative reviews. What a shame.

There's so much that's wrong with this new version of the Australian classic that it's hard to know where to start. First there's the direction - tricksy, flashy and sprinkled with "creative" flourishes more evocative of 80s music videos than Australia in 1900. It's uneven from episode to episode, unhelpful in establishing the kind of eerie, dreamy atmosphere that the story demands, and frequently just yanks us out of the period and out of the story. The performances are jarringly uneven too, ranging from naturalistic (though, unfortunately, in an anachronistic contemporary style) to fruity amateur-theatrical emoting, with highly questionable accents. The location for the girl's school is ludicrously lavish, a sprawling mansion replete with marble columns and ornate fixtures - an unlikely girl's school anywhere in Australia at any time, but utterly nonsensical in a remote rural area in 1900. And then there's the depiction of the bush and hanging rock itself - over-saturated hues that make everything seem green and lush, and even a shimmering lake. It looks more English than Australian, and absolutely nothing like the dry Macedon Ranges in which the story is set. The same lack of care extends to the dialogue and the depiction of social conventions of the time, with almost every exchange between "the gentry" and the lower orders being hilariously unlikely. If you watch this Picnic with the expectation of something eerie and other-worldly, you may well find it... and it's most likely the sound of poor Joan Lindsay turning in her grave.

...not because the series was bad, although what I did see was incredibly bad, but because I could not get past the 1990's New Age soundtrack. Not only did it sound more like dinner music played in an desperately upscale restaurant, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the story and was intrusive enough to take me right out of the show and start wondering what Kitaro is doing these days.