INCANTATIONS FROM A PARALLEL UNIVERSE

 

"Except for those people down there, we might be the only ones in the whole world"

- That mysterious incantation often chimes through my head, catching me unaware and I find myself reciting it over again with absolutely no recollection of its implantation into my brain. The last time it came to haunt me was watching a Greek film at the Sydney Film festival called L. All I remember was it running through my head like a wild canary trapped in a cage. And as soon as the film finished, of course, it vanished. My first hypothesis was that it came from a mixtape I had developed quite an infatuation with, in which Marc Bolan and T-rex read fairy-tales about handsome elves, slices of blueberry pie and some mythical lily pond. It seemed to me the line would have slid in somewhere there, very nicely indeed. Hypothosis number two next; God is definitely trying to talk to me; am I yet to acknowledge its profound and resonating subliminal truth? Am I? Then I watched Picnic at Hanging Rock and the planets re-aligned. The line was in the goddamn movie! -

The film, directed by Peter Wier, harks back to the 1900s in all is Edwardian glory. The long white lace dresses, with creme puff sleeves and high frilled necklines, the parasols, the straw hats the corsets and plaited pigtails... It all makes me want to slip into a parallel universe whose portal appears in a rock face somewhere to find myself sprawled across a picnic blanket, reading a paperback book in the afternoon sun.

The cinematography is simply magic, especially for a film made in 1975; to aid in the creation of a dream sequence in the film, Weir used an old piece of material from a wedding dress over the camera lense! It certainly served to capture the ethereal essence of the film that left me with a feeling of euphoric bliss combined with a bizarely sentimental acknowledgment of nature and our man-made confinements of time. I was even largely impressed with the acting of cast of fairly young females (of uneartly beauty) led by Anne Louise Lambert as Miranda  and Jackie Weaver, who later emerged to be one of our cinema and stage legends, in a minor role as the maid.

Picnic at Hanging Rock has become somewhat of a cultural relic in our cinematic history and a definite must see on the Criterion list.