
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-upDecember 2016 – January 2017
Arts & Letters
Nostalgia
for my school friends
I think of the luxury cars we drove as teenagers –
Audis, Mercedes, Lexus, Bimmers.
Brooks Brothers leather and cashmere sweaters.
Padlock Tiffany fobs. Kate Spade totes.
The knowing yearbook notes: il miglior fabbro,
see you in Belize! We got our tans at sophisticated lakes –
you could tell they were premium. The water
was pretty much Evian. No more than we deserved:
silver service Cokes and lobster rolls, black diamond
weekends in Aspen. French lessons? Bien sûr, chérie, you bet.
Après ski, sophomore trips to Paris and the Met.
A Harvard woman in Wayfarers and a trench
came to recruit our brains, which were the size of the state
she said, fast and sleek as Corvettes. They opened doors,
were plush as debutante balls, cost a bomb.
But we nailed our vitae: honour roll, choir, varsity tennis.
Gridiron? God, no; soccer. (Our sports were European.)
Philosophy class: Kant, Camus, absurdism.
Our teacher we called by his given name (Jim).
Jim showed us Ubu Roi, the sad wrong jaguars of Rousseau.
We aced trig and calculus, everything you could know
from Lincoln to Clinton. Blue dress, log cabin.
No cheer team. We were leaders. We fed the homeless
foiled burritos like silver bullets and started not-for-profits,
partied in our parents’ boardrooms and drank Everclear
from ironic red dixie cups. We showered every penny
of our college years on worthy NGOs. Our empires
could come later, after the consulting years; we had time
at our disposal, and after all, we could afford it:
we had generously upholstered souls, and everybody knows
America was beautiful at the end of the century
and charity begins with our kind of beautiful money.
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 art of biography
The author stays out of the picture, and other personal rules of writingA pox on both your houses
How can the major parties address the rise of populism in Australia?Performance check-up
How should doctors be assessed? And how should they assess themselves?‘Nude: Art from the Tate Collection’
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, until 5 FebruaryThe 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 adaptationA writer unfolded: Elena Ferrante’s ‘In the Margins’
In an essay collection, the mysterious author of the Neapolitan novels pursues the “excessive” to counter patriarchal literature’s dominanceCannes 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