Out with the panpipes, in with the sexual politics: it’s a ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ retooled for our times – the week in TV
Adapting Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock for television might seem unnecessary after Peter Weir’s unassailable 1975 film. It’s certainly brave.
In Weir’s hands, Lindsay’s psychosexual mystery – about three schoolgirls (and a teacher) who disappear during a field trip to Australia’s “Hanging Rock” on Valentine’s Day, 1900 – becomes a shimmering paean to both Mother Nature and lost innocence. Its mood is earthy and ethereal. Soft-focus lenses linger on lush wildlife. Girls in white dresses glow angelically in the sunshine.
By contrast, the new six-part series of Picnic at Hanging Rock (BBC Two, Wednesday), written by Beatrix Christian and Alice Addison, is lively and contemporary, from the synthesised score and oblique camera angles to the energetic montages and saturated palette. We still get those white dresses, but there are no panpipes here.
As with the recent adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, the series also has a firm grip on the zeitgeist. Feminism! Race! Queerness! It replaces the ciphers of Weir’s film, gazed upon from afar by a male director, with effervescent free spirits, giddy on youth.
While the opening episode clearly borrowed from Sofia Coppola's woozy, woman's-eye version of The Beguiled, it was also arch and pulpy, a sweltering whodunit charged with a sense of foreboding. At times it was all a bit much: the exposition; the sensuality; the virginal symbolism of those outfits. If Weir’s film thrives on restraint and ambiguity, then this episode’s approach was very much show and tell.
Luckily the performances were fun. As Hester Appleyard, the English headmistress, Game of Thrones’ Natalie Dormer was superb – at once pragmatic, poised, twisted and deranged. “Bad timing will define your life,” she snarled at a frightened girl who got her first period the day of the picnic.
Among the younger cast, Lily Sullivan caught the eye as Miranda Reid, the faintly rebellious, often-barefooted tomboy with whom, it was suggested, 14-year-old orphan Sara Waybourne (Inez Curro) is besotted (“You must learn to love someone else apart from me, Sara”).
Miranda was one of the girls who veered off from the picnic and disappeared up that strange monolith. The soil throbbed and the forest teemed with menace, as if powered by paranormal forces. The scene was as gorgeous as it was unnerving: like the girls, I was drawn in too.
Ominous woodlands also played a part in the week’s other new big-budget mystery. Sharp Objects (Sky Atlantic, Monday), adapted by Marti Noxon from the novel by Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl), is a whodunit-cum-psychological drama, and stars the five-time Oscar nominee Amy Adams.
In the opening episode, Adams, perhaps the most dependable actress in Hollywood, was flat-out sensational. She plays Camille, a self-destructive, hard-drinking reporter in Chicago who has been assigned to cover a grisly murder in Wind Gap, Missouri, the provincial town from which she’d escaped years previously.
But what drove her away in the first place? It wasn’t just a toxic relationship with her brittle, narcissistic mother (an icy Patricia Clarkson). No, from grainy flashbacks woven seamlessly into the present-day narrative, we found out that Camille also used to have a sister, who had died when they were younger. If the psychological scars were obvious, so, too, were the physical. Camille is a self-harmer, with an itch to cut words into her flesh. Speaking in a slow, distrusting drawl, Adams plays her as an open wound. She’s desolate and disturbing.
The episode itself moved slowly, confident in its own skin. Just as last year’s Big Little Lies was brightly lit and lacquered with glossy grading to give the impression that everything was perfect, so director Jean-Marc Vallée’s follow-up series is claustrophobic and dripping with sweat – a Southern Gothic nightmare drenched in decay. It’s a drama worthy of Amy Adams’s talent.
Meanwhile, one of Britain’s own finest actresses was busy tracing her ancestry in BBC One’s Who Do You Think You Are? on Monday night. Olivia Colman, who had been convinced that her family was “boring”, was anything but, embracing the whole thing with comic gusto and plenty of charm.
As ever, there were tears, which came when she learnt how her great-great-great grandmother Harriot, aged three, was sent from India to Britain on her own after her father was killed in a shooting accident. “The thing I feel saddest about is we don’t know more about Harriot’s mummy,” Colman lamented. This kind of emotional engagement is precisely why the programme remains so popular.
