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-upMay 2008
Arts & Letters
‘Miracles of Life’ by JG Ballard
In the same way that Gabriel Garcia Marquez downplays elements of the fantastic in his work, JG Ballard's autobiography demonstrates how the 77-year-old's surreal fiction has consisted of the writer unpacking memories of his Shanghai boyhood in the years before, during and after World War II. This opening section of the book - familiar to readers of Empire of the Sun - is packed with arresting images: abandoned pools and submarines; the fatal beating of a Chinese man by Japanese soldiers; the media-saturated landscape of "the wickedest city in the world". The memoir loses its way slightly when Ballard, after a period stationed in Canada with the RAF, relocates to England for the second time, in 1960. Without the backdrop of the war, its violence and privations, the narrative slows and we are left with an ordinary man leading a suburban life.
Ballard has taken the pulse of the twentieth century as well as anyone - not surprisingly, since his obsessions with the consumption of technology, sex and violence mirror those of the age - and his talent for juxtaposing eerie landscapes and extreme pathologies is on display here, along with what is perhaps his weakness, namely an inability to convincingly portray people's inner lives. In oddly textureless prose he tells of courting his wife, Mary; of her sudden death, at age 33; and of his subsequent life as a father of three and writer of subversive fiction.
Where this book - likely, Ballard says, to be his last - is strongest is in outlining the attractions of science fiction ("where the future survives") and his first attempts at the genre. He derides modernists as self-obsessed and disconnected from the real world ("No one in Sartre or Thomas Mann ever paid for a haircut"), and takes a swipe at government-funded arts, the literary establishment and the occasional literary editor. He relates his encounters with the works of Sigmund Freud and the surrealists, as well as his admiration for Francis Bacon, whose painting provided the aesthetic linchpin for his own suspicions of the times. What emerges in Miracles of Life is a man not given to self-analysis but fascinated by the contemporary world and the ways in which an artist might engage with it.
The art of the teal
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The end of Liberal reign in Kooyong
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The 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’
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One 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 adaptation
Art 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 Ryan
The avoidable war
Kevin Rudd on China, the US and the forces of history
