The girl’s long hair flicked through the early morning whispers, the corners of the white skirt rustled like summer cicada wings, the misty mountains had hidden secrets for millions of years, and the flowers and flowers could not solve the mystery of a day. On Valentine's Day in 1900, students from Appleyard Girls’ School came to Xuanshiling for a picnic, but the girls never heard from them. The film "Picnic under the Cliff" uses beautiful photography style and pre-Raphaelite painting-like color composition to create a dreamlike atmosphere, but the mystery of the broken thread, the contradictory suggestion, the narrative and the impenetrable airtightness are broken. The metaphor of is still more disturbing than enjoyment, just like ladies' exquisite corsets, the surface is elegant but it is difficult to conceal the depression. The film attempts to construct a dualistic tension between the beauty of the Victorian era and the primitive mystery of Australia, but when we discover that the veil of moral hypocrisy seems to be wrapped in hysterical eroticism, there may be some kind of evil in the so-called primitive vitality. When power is at work, the doubts brought about by this multiple ambiguous text dissolve the critical power that the film may try to convey.
Surrounding the mystery of the girl’s disappearance, the big and small mysteries in the film also include: What does the watch that stopped at 12 o'clock on the day of the disappearance and the red cloud that the girl saw? Why does the teacher who goes looking for a girl only wears underwear? Why did Irma, the surviving girl, have so many scars on her body, but her bare feet are unstained, and why did she lose her bra? The surviving Irma and Edith kept silent about what happened. Are they really forgotten or deliberately concealed because they are hard to tell? In the end, the principal also died under the cliff. Did he commit suicide? The heavy suspicion and the shadow of death make this film have all the elements of a suspense film, but it is not. When the director Peter Weir talked about the creation of the film, he said that he tried all means to prevent the audience from struggling with the answers. The opposite is that it is precisely the answer that the director did not give in the end that has become the focus of many audiences' disputes: is it a simple accidental death or the suicide of a girl who stays in the most beautiful moment? Is it from male violence or ambiguous homosexuality in girls’ schools? Is it to leave or enter another time and space?
The film really challenges the audience's way of viewing the film not only in the open ending, but the most confusing thing is that the clues and hints provided by the film open up infinite possibilities while inevitably falling into a self-contradictory dilemma. Suddenly stopped clocks, sky visions, rock walls resembling savage faces recurring in the camera, and the hypnotized steps of girls all suggest the existence of supernatural powers, and the repeated rendering of Valentine's Day and the details of underwear Emphasize that the gaze of the man in the forest towards the young girl is full of sexual hints, but the two doctors’ examinations specifically emphasized that the surviving young girls are still virgins. It seems that every proposition implies an opposite proposition. Putting aside the chaos, the original intention of the director seems to be to draw people's attention to the level of metaphor and meaning, rather than the ins and outs of the facts. This "metaphysical" mysterious disappearance may be as expressed in the poem of Allan Poe read through Miranda's mouth: "All that we see or feel is just a dream in a dream" (All that we see or It seems is but a dream within a dream.) The beginning of the girl’s dream of freedom and romance is the end of the dream of power and order in the ancient empire.
In Appleyard, a school aimed at cultivating ladies, the girls spoke softly, walked in lines, and wore almost the same dresses. In the short “indulgence” on Valentine’s Day, the girls were intoxicated by Valentine’s Day. The throbbing love poems on the greeting cards, even if there is no lover, they are immersed in the narcissism of youth and the imagination of romantic love; after passing through the small town, all the girls can't wait to take off their gloves; facing the wild and strange On the cliff, the girls couldn't help exclaiming, "She waited for a million years just to wait for us to come", it was indeed a romantic idea. On a deserted and sunny hillside, Edith sighed: "Except for the people below, we may be the only creatures in the world." In absolute desolation, people are always more likely to feel lonely and easier. Nearly absolute existence. At this time, the camera was deliberately zoomed out. The girl picnicking on the grass seemed to be locked in an oil painting, and the whole world was so quiet that only this grass and these people were left. But more meaningful, the following shots advanced to the local details of the grass, ants and various small insects surged on the leftover food residue. Obviously, they are not the "only creatures" here, and far away Looking at the beautiful and classical picture, it is not without dirty. In other words, the ubiquitous life on the Australian soil is the master here.
The most special one among the girls is Miranda, as beautiful as a Botticelli angel out of a Renaissance picture, and an elegant figure like the swan princess in a fairy tale; she is more obsessed with meticulous appreciation than books or pastries. A blooming daisy; she pays more attention to the place above the blue sky than the rugged road under her feet. In the picnic section, there are many close-ups of Miranda’s face that overlap with the blue sky, mountains, birds, and flowers, which seems to imply that her disappearance is gradually dissolving in bursts of dizziness. In the nature she loves, it turns into a daisy, or a swan wandering on the lake. Compared with the vigorous grass and stone in Xuanshiling, all the rules and precepts in the square school look so pale; the girl’s eyes are attracted by the freely hovering flocks of birds and the towering mountain peaks, in the blue abyss of the sky. Here, the shackles of the world no longer take effect. They take off their stockings and are as light as barefoot fairies; looking down at the world below the mountain, they discover how humble and blind people live, day after day repeating rituals that they don't know.
Regarding the understanding of the mystery of the girl’s disappearance, the director’s intention is most clearly reflected in the passage where Micheal returns to the mountains to search for Miranda. The exhausted Micheal collapsed to the ground, seeming to be captured by some force. On a surreal level, some of the dialogues of the girls before and after the picnic were echoing between the peaks-"The watch stopped at twelve. Click it, it has never stopped before", "Waiting for a million years, just for us", "Everything starts and ends at a specific time and place", "It has been stretched into the sky", "People are full of Living purposelessly, performing rituals that he didn't realize"...Although Micheal followed Miranda and his party after the encounter at the creek, the words before he met the girls also echoed at this time, obviously not just in Micheal's mind. Memories, but the director intends to emphasize the importance of these words. "Miranda knows some things that other people don't know, some secrets, she knows she won't be back." Perhaps the sensitive and ethereal Miranda understands that the so-called life of thin ladies and beautiful clothes is just a dream in a dream. This land that has not been touched by civilization is the real place, just like the dormant volcano that has been waiting for millions of years. Instead of sleeping in silence for a hundred years, it is better to burn out in the best day; rather than blindly like a reptile. When the earth becomes a slave to daily rituals, it is better to listen to the call of the sky at this moment when the heavens, the earth and the people meet.
In this life, Miranda's departure signaled the awakening of the individual's life. In this shore, Sara's suicide pierced the Victorian greenhouse illusion of self-deception. This ugly, thin and lonely girl was portrayed as a Jane Eyre character, obsessed with the almost perfect "Miranda" (Miranda). The principal’s “special treatment”, one step forward, she feels suffocated in the school’s dogma, one step further, the unbearable orphanage has only unfaced fear; in the stubborn and decisive Sara, there is no such thing as the heroine of a 19th-century novel. Romantic miracle; the cruelest part of the film is not just Sara’s death. Through Sara’s memories and Micheal’s man servant Albert’s dream, we learn that Albert is Sara’s lost brother in the orphanage as a child, but the whole film does not Before they created any chance to meet, they could only faintly feel the existence of each other in their dreams. This treatment broke all the audience's expectations for the traditional melodrama, making it uncomfortable and desolate.
"Everything starts and ends at a specific time and place." The specific time and place selected for the film is Australia in 1900. In this year, Britain gave up its rule of Australia, and the Victorian era came to an end the following year. The girl’s mysterious disappearance symbolizes everything that has broken free from bondage, where everything has escaped order. The Victorian civilization and morals are bankrupt, just like the headmistress’s meticulously combed bun, which is messy and dim after all; maybe it’s a girl’s. Gone is also a symbol of the passing of a certain age-specific beauty. The last time she looked back and beckoned, it was like a glimpse of an era.
In this early movie of Peter Weir, he can already foresee his increasingly mature institutional critical thinking in movies such as "Dead Poetry Society" and "Trumen's World". The nostalgic gaze that is close to fetishism in the times is still a farewell patrol facing the old photos of the principal’s office at the end. The political implication and moral criticism of the film is far less impressive than the atmosphere creation and camera control. Maybe The best way to watch this film is to put aside the mystery of the suspense film, put aside the connotation of the literary film, and simply immerse in it and have a dream in it.
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