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-upJune 2009
Arts & Letters
‘Reunion’ by Andrea Goldsmith
Andrea Goldsmith's new novel is truly exciting. Like its brilliant protagonists, Reunion is passionate about ideas, dissecting them thoroughly and hungrily. A kind of inner-city intellectual counterpart to Christos Tsiolkas's suburban masterpiece The Slap, it is a novel about how we live now, about the lifestyles and values of present-day Melbourne and, by extension, Australia. By juxtaposing today's city with the very different Melbourne of the late 1970s, Goldsmith illuminates the cultural and physical changes that have taken place in the years between the Whitlam and Howard eras. In particular, she charts the shift in morality and the way that technology is transforming communication and knowledge - and with them, relationships.
Bestselling novelist Ava, world-renowned scientist Helen, acclaimed popular philosopher Connie and underachieving religion expert Jack ("the brightest of them all") attended university together in the '70s, a time of free education and lofty ideals. At Oxford, they met fellow Australian Harry, an eccentric, old-money collector who married Ava, much to the others' disgust. Twenty years later, "homunculus" Harry heads a major new think-tank, NOGA, and he has lured Ava's friends back to Melbourne as the organisation's inaugural fellows. Goldsmith takes the reader deep beneath the skin of these characters, shifting between narrators to show each from a variety of perspectives: how they see themselves, how they project themselves to the world, how others see them. The truth, of course, lies somewhere in between, and half the novel's fun is in puzzling it out.
Reunion explores the passions that drive the old friends and the compromises they consider when threatened with the loss of their driving force. "It is the storms that matter, the storms that test you," observes Helen, struggling to hold onto her ideals and her beloved science. The NOGA fellows are all faced with questions about the corporatisation of knowledge and its associated costs. The friends are devoted to the primacy of ‘the examined life'; yet they deliberately avoid - in their work and relationships - much important knowledge and insight.
Reunion is dense with ideas that never overpower its characters and plot, but instead drive them with a seemingly instinctual logic.
The 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
OnlyFans and the adults in the room
The emerging OnlyFans community offering training and support to adult-content creators
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’
A virtuoso memoir of music and trauma, and his experiences as a child prodigy, from the acclaimed Australian pianist
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
