
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-upAugust 2008
Arts & Letters
‘Tales from Outer Suburbia’ by Shaun Tan
Shaun Tan's publisher shelves Tales from Outer Suburbia as Young Adult Fiction, while a local bookshop of mine has wedged its copies of these illustrated stories in the children's section, right next to Dr Seuss. Imagine my surprise at this, when all the time I was reading the book, I - a perfectly grown-up 35-year-old - thought it was written for me.
Just who Tan's work is supposed to be for, and which pigeonhole it refuses to sit tidily within, are questions that have come up often enough in the Western Australian writer-illustrator's stellar career to warrant him publishing, on his website, a lengthy manifesto in which he argues that it is up to a work of art to find its own audience.
Tales from Outer Suburbia, lavishly stocked with visual and verbal delights, is a book to which any reader might return, at a later age or stage, to find the resonance of its contents slightly altered.
There might be times when it is the playfulness and whimsy of Tan's Suburbia that most appeals. Then, you might particularly enjoy ‘Eric', the tale of an enigmatic foreign-exchange student who confounds his hosts with his interest in the minutiae of life; or ‘No Other Country', about the exotic and expansive hopes that can be contained within even the most modest of suburban homes.
There might be other times when it is Tan's precision in balancing the pervasive forces of cruelty and tenderness that strikes a chord. At which time you might like to read, in ‘Broken Toys', about the unexpected mending of a heart, or, in ‘Wake', about the consequences of beating your dog.
At any old time, you might just like to applaud the perspicacity of ‘Alert But Not Alarmed', in which good citizens must adapt to a new law mandating that each household have its own intercontinental ballistic missile.
Eke out these short, pitch-perfect stories over a number of sittings, if you can, or wolf them all down in one greedy session: either way, it will be hard not to be seduced by Tan's witty reconfiguration of Suburbia as a place as odd, unexpected and surreal as the hearts and minds of its inhabitants.
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