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It happens from time to time that I take my manuscripts along to the Ulverston Writers group, and there are repeated comments that I have left too many questions unanswered, that I haven't made everything clear, and spelt out all the details. And then I despair, because I know that the bean-counters who run the publishing houses these days are very well aware that the great bookbuying public want certainties.
Well, such people won't like Picnic at Hanging Rock, which raises an awful lot of questions and leaves all of them unanswered.
Naturally, it's right up my street, because it's the sort of experience that leaves you reeling, wanting more, brooding on it. picking it over in your mind to find meaning, and knowing that whatever meaning you take from it is unique to you.
It's a simple enough premise. On St Valentine's Day in the final year of the nineteenth century, a party of repressed Victorian (in more than one sense) schoolgirls, together with two of their teachers, set out for a picnic at the eponymous geological formation in the Australian backwood. Before the end of the day three of the girls and one of their teachers have vanished without trace, and a fourth girl is hysterical from trauma. But what happened? Did one of the girls know she wouldn't be returning from the outing?
Not much actually happens, but it's all utterly gripping. There's no sex but it positively oozes sexuality; the sense of repression is played down and is all the more all-consuming for that. And above and about it all there's this ancient land that will not be tamed by the incoming Brits with all their hubris of Empire.
Peter Weir would go on to make Witness and Dead Poets Society - fine films, both, but cut-and-dried in the approved Hollywood style. This, on the other hand, is a small-scale film originally made for limited consumption, and it's none the worse for being freed from the chains of the Hollywood beancounters.
