By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to Peter Weir’s revered Australian New Wave classic Picnic At Hanging Rock.
In Australia, we have a sorry habit of taking way too much notice of what people overseas think of us. Like a bunch of wet-nappied babies desperate for attention from the big kids, the drool starts to flow when we get noticed by the Americans, the British, or, even better, the French. It’s like a stamp of approval ensuring us that, yes, a certain film, artist, or piece of music is actually impressive. “Phew,” we collectively sigh, “that means we can like it too.”
Nowhere is this more evident than with Australia’s film industry, a slice of cultural territory populated by more wankers than any other section of the arts…even the theatre…and that’s really saying something! Note the way-back-when case of Samson And Delilah, a boring-as-bat-shit flick about two kids looking bored and sniffing petrol.
When Warwick Thornton’s 2009 debut copped the Camera d’Or (rhymes with bore) gong for Best First Feature at The Cannes Film Festival – the cinematic jewel in the crown of the nation that thinks Jerry Lewis is a comic genius – all the scarf-wearing tools in the Australian film industry looked up from behind their over-determined eyewear and proclaimed it a masterpiece. Watch Samson And Delilah again. It’s got less depth and far less incident than an episode of Neighbours. You’ll be asleep within half an hour.
An equally boring film is Peter Weir’s lace-laden, pan-pipe-driven, “ethereal masterpiece” Picnic At Hanging Rock, a pile of semi-spiritual hokum about a bunch of ditzy schoolgirls who get lost while poncing around in the Australian outback. Like Samson And Delilah, this is a film loved by the cineglitterati around the world…so much so that it inspired an equally awful TV remake in 2018 that was even longer and more boring…quite the achievement!
The crowds swooned over the original Picnic At Hanging Rock at The Cannes Film Festival, the international critics got all worked up, and it was even released in the US by the “esteemed” arthouse label Criterion (back when physical media actually mattered), a sure sign of its utter tedium. Picnic At Hanging Rock is a film where literally nothing happens until right at the end. It’s like a teen flick without the laughs, and by the time the doe eyed schoolgirls finally disappear into that big, stupid rock, you’ll be bloody glad that it’s over…no matter what they think of it in France.
For a far more positive reading of Picnic At Hanging Rock, check out Anna Backman Rogers’ book-length appraisal of the film as published by BFI Classics and Bloomsbury. Click here for more information.
