Blixen’s Out of Africa is a memoir without picnics. But Pollack and his screenwriter Kurt Luedke have added two picnic episodes that reveal Blixen’s characteristic vanity and romantic nature. Neither is a particularly happy picnic.
The first picnic is in winter at a hunt luncheon, during which Blixen makes a reckless decision to marry Baron Bror von Blixen, whom she’s had an affair with but doesn’t love. When Blixen offers to trade her money in exchange for the title of Lady Blixen, she appears impetuous and vain. In an instant, she is into an unhappy marriage and a severe syphilis infection. 
The second picnic takes place in summer. It’s a romantic picnic at which Blixen and her long-term lover, Denys Finch-Hatton, have retreated to their favorite trysting place on a ridge overlooking the Kenyan plains. Enjoying the afternoon, Finch-Hatton eats his green oranges and drinks his favorite Chateau Yquem. (How they cool it is a mystery.) They listen to Blixen’s gramophone and a selection of records, perhaps Mozart, a favorite.) Little interest is given to the rest of the food, though Blixen was interested in food and had lessons from a French chef before leaving Kenya.
Blixen casts a pall over the picnic that turns it bitter-sweet as she and Finch-Hatton discuss their long affair, which Blixen knows must end without a marriage. Blixen has discussed this before, but feeling melancholic tells Finch-Hatton that this is the hillside where she would like to be buried. “If I get eaten up sometime, bury me here, will you?” she says. “Whatever’s left. Just there, at the crest of the hill.” Ironically, Fitch-Hatton is killed in a plane crash and buried on the hillside.
See Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen]. Out of Africa (New York: Random House, 1938); Sidney Pollack. Out of Africa (1985). Screenplay by Kurt Luedke adapted from Errol Trzebinski’s Silence Will Speak, Judith Thurman’s Isak Dinesen, and Isak Dinesen’s memoir Out of Africa. Errol Trzebinski. Silence will Speak, A Study of Denys Finch Hatton, and his relationship with Karen Blixen (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1977), Judith Thurman. Isak Dinesen: The Life of Karen Blixen, Storyteller ( New York: Penguin 1984)
The cast: Meryl Streep as Karin Blixen; Robert Redford as Denys Finch Hatton; Klaus Maria Brandauer as Baron Bror von Blixen