Picnic and death are paradoxical, sometimes. In their search for interest and inventiveness, filmmakers are keen to include death at a picnic. Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal is set during a time of plague when death is rife. Agnes Varda’s Happiness is ironically titled for a film about adispairing hering her marriage commits suicide by drowning; picnic chatter in François Truffaut. Les deux Anglaises et le continent isabout death; a picnic ends in the accidental death by drowning in Ken Russell’s, and Rob Reiner’s picnic in The Princess Bride ends with death by poison.
Ingmar Bergman. The Seventh Seal aka Det sjunde inseglet. The screenplay is by Ingmar Bergman (1957). During an interlude, the Block and the troupe have a picnic, which brings only a temporary respite, defying for the moment Death’s inevitability. Max von Sydow as Block sits far left.
Agnes Varda. Le Bonheur (1964). Screenplay is by Agnes Varda. François, as François Chevalier, holds Claire Drouot as Thérèse Chevalier, who has just committed suicide by drowning.
François Truffaut. Les deux Anglaises et le continent , aka The Two English Girls and the Continent (1971). The screenplay is by Truffaut and Jean Gruault, based on Pierre-Henri Roche’s semi-autobiographical novel (1956). Truffaut’s title Les deux Anglaises et le continent refers to two English girls, Muriel and Anne Brown, and their unrequited lover, Claude Roc, a Frenchman. It’s a confusing title until it is explained that the girls affectionately call Claude “le continent.” Even so, it’s a ditsy commentary on their relationship that is a jumbled ménage a trois in which no one is happy. “When I was fifteen,” Claude says, “I decided to die.” Locking himself in his bedroom, he lit a fire under his bed and slit his wrists. He says that he was saved by the smoke wafting from under his locked door. Jean-Claude Leaud as Claude, Stacy Tendeter as Murie, and Kiki Markham as Ann.
Ken Russell. Women in Love (1982). The screenplay by Larry Kramer is based on D.H. Lawrence’s 1920 novel. The picnic, euphemistically called a “Water Party,” ends when Gerald’s sister drowns. Gerald (Oliver Reed) frantically attempts to find her body in the dark water but fails. The picnics end, and her death foreshadows Gerold’s unhappy love affair with Ursula Brangwen.
Featured Image: Rob Reiner. The Princess Bride (1987). The screenplay is by William Goldman, based on his 1973 novel. Vizzini disingenuously asks, “But it’s so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you
Are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his goblet, or his enemy’s?” He’s so confident that he brags: “You only think I guessed wrong! That’s what’s so funny! I switched glasses when your back was turned! Ha ha!
You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!! Ha
ha ha ha ha ha!! Ha ha ha!” And he falls dead! Roberts has poisoned both goblets. Wallace Shawn as Vizzini and Robin Wright as Princess Buttercup.