
Cannes Film Festival 2022 highlights: part one
Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘One Fine Morning’, Charlotte Le Bon’s ‘Falcon Lake’ and Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s ‘Pamfir’ were bright spots in an otherwise underwhelming line-upFebruary 2006
Arts & Letters
‘Family Wanted: Adoption Stories’ edited by Sara Holloway
Happenstance, Daniel Menaker calls it, the utterly contingent nature of our lives. Family Wanted is an anthology of essays by some very fine writers about lives shaped by adoption. It confronts us with the brute fact that one’s existence can hang by a mere thread, such as the chance of a split condom.
As the viewpoint shifts between adopted children, relinquishing birth mothers and adoptive parents, it is in turns savage and moving, raw and detached, comic and cruel. The theme of rescue one expects, yet some adopted children seem not so much to be rescued themselves as to rescue their parents. Others, like Robert Dessaix, felt “almost dangerously wanted”. Dessaix’s father held his small son aloft “like a trophy, head back laughing with the unearned joy of it”. But poor overwrought Jean, her Calvinist soul wound up too tight for love, was the wrong mother for Dessaix. Wrongness of fit, psychologists politely call it; a family life spent staring at each other in bewildered incomprehension.
Priscilla Nagle, a relinquishing mother, hears “screams which never die”. Her son “is always alive, and you don’t know where, and you don’t know how”. After Lynn Lauber spends “sodden, lethargic months” in the Friends Home for Unwed Mothers, her baby is taken away straight after birth, “without sight or sound”.
In contrast, stories by adopting parents are full of hope. Meg Bortin adopts a scrap of skin and bone called Djeneba from a Malian orphanage. Bald through malnutrition, at nine months she weighs the same as a healthy four-month-old. Bortin bonds with her daughter after watching her fall asleep with exhaustion after eating fifteen grains of rice. By the story’s end Djeneba is five, “a scamp and a rascal … full of life”. If Bortin had not taken her, she would likely have died.
And there it hovers, over every story: happenstance.
Cannes Film Festival 2022 highlights: part one
Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘One Fine Morning’, Charlotte Le Bon’s ‘Falcon Lake’ and Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s ‘Pamfir’ were bright spots in an otherwise underwhelming line-upThe art of the teal
Amid the long decline of the major parties, have independents finally solved the problem of lopsided campaign financing laws?The end of Liberal reign in Kooyong
At the Auburn Hotel on election night, hope coalesces around Monique RyanOnlyFans and the adults in the room
The emerging OnlyFans community offering training and support to adult-content creatorsThe quip and the dead: Steve Toltz’s ‘Here Goes Nothing’
A bleakly satirical look at death and the afterlife from the wisecracking author of ‘A Fraction of the Whole’Ghost notes: Simon Tedeschi’s ‘Fugitive’
A virtuoso memoir of music and trauma, and his experiences as a child prodigy, from the acclaimed Australian pianistOne small step: ‘Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood’ and ‘Deep Water’
Richard Linklater’s rotoscoped film evokes the optimism of late-1960s America, while Patricia Highsmith’s thriller gets another disappointing adaptationArt heist: The landmark conviction of an Aboriginal art centre’s manager
The jailing of Mornington Island Art’s chief executive for dishonest dealing has shone a light on ethics and colonialism in the Indigenous art world‘Loveland’
Robert Lukins’ second novel takes a Brisbane woman to Nebraska, where an inheritance sparks a change in character as well as in fortune‘We Own This City’
David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, returns to Baltimore for a present-day examination of rapacious police corruption‘Slow Horses’
A sardonic Gary Oldman heads a misfit branch of MI5 in Apple TV+’s thrilling exploration of personal motivation and political expedience‘The Golden Cockerel’
Barrie Kosky’s Adelaide production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera satirising the Russo-Japanese War came with uneasy resonancesCannes Film Festival 2022 highlights: part one
Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘One Fine Morning’, Charlotte Le Bon’s ‘Falcon Lake’ and Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s ‘Pamfir’ were bright spots in an otherwise underwhelming line-upThe art of the teal
Amid the long decline of the major parties, have independents finally solved the problem of lopsided campaign financing laws?The end of Liberal reign in Kooyong
At the Auburn Hotel on election night, hope coalesces around Monique RyanThe avoidable war
Kevin Rudd on China, the US and the forces of history