Cannes Film Festival 2010: Wall Street 2, On Tour, The Housemaid, Aurora and Tuesday, After Christmas

Could it be, as Gordon Gekko might say in Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, that Cannes is simply the next bubble? With only three competition films screened so far, it's too early to place bets. Still, this year's festival has wasted no time in announcing its highbrow ambitions. Facing a slate yesterday that looked unusually forbidding (new films by Wang Xiaoshuai, Manoel de Oliveira, Im Sangsoo and Radu Muntean—not household names, but closely watched in cinephile circles), I filled an empty slot with a low-rent kidnapping thriller in the market just to vary the pace.

This year's Palme d'Or race got off to an entertaining start with Mathieu Amalric's On Tour, a scrappy travelogue about a former TV producer (played by Amalric himself) reduced to a job as small-time burlesque promoter. He finds that, in his wreck of a life, the earthy American strippers he's touring around France are the closest thing he has to a family. This wasn't the weightiest entry that could have kicked off the main event for the press (or the most original—the conception of the character borrows heavily from the strip club owner played by Ben Gazzara in Cassavetes' The Killing of a Chinese Bookie), but when the compensations are Amalric's dryly comic reactions to chaos surrounding him, it's tough to complain. His flirtation with a gas-station attendant seems to be an almost universal early candidate for the festival's most beloved scene, but there's something to be said for a smaller moment when, retrieving his kid at a police station, Amalric's character wordlessly shrugs off faking his ability to remember his son's birth date.

Since then, the competition entries have been shaky. Initially placed in a sidebar, Wang's mawkish and slapdash Chongqing Blues, about a father's attempts to comprehend the motives of his estranged criminal son, would have seemed a desperate choice in any section. Im's The Housemaid has its share of defenders. A stylish inflation of an amazing, sui generis 1960 Korean classic (which you can stream online here; it's been remade before and is probably as iconic in Korea as Psycho is to us), Im's film reverses the original's central power dynamic, so that instead of wreaking havoc on the household where she works, the eponymous maid is now seduced and victimized by her ostentatiously wealthy employer. The class issues of the first film are brought to the fore with a vengeance, and the subtle sense of foreboding is scrapped. The movie holds your attention, but beyond a vertiginous mise-en-scène (and a throat-grabbing, handheld prologue), the film never quite answers the question of why it exists.

Apropos of the income gap, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (which premiered today) has been greeted in some quarters as if it were an economic catastrophe itself, as to opposed to a decently compelling return to the kind of topical muckraking that Stone once nearly had cornered in American fiction filmmaking. It's also, par for the course for Stone, a bit of a scramble, divided between the imperatives of the director's editorializing (including a blunt if cathartic kneecapping of Goldman Sachs—or "Churchill Schwartz," as it's known in the film) and the more conventional necessities of a sequel, in which the eight-years-out-of-prison Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas, leathery as ever) is forced to grow and change. It's so engaging to watch the character take on the present financial climate that it's a distraction, especially in the miscalculated final scenes, to be asked to care about Gekko's loyalty to his protégé (Shia LeBeouf) and whether he reunites with his daughter (Carey Mulligan).

For a richer family dynamic, one of the fest's genuine discoveries so far has been Tuesday, After Christmas, which finds Romanian director Muntean (The Paper Will Be Blue) assimilating the long-take style of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. This is a rare film that addresses the inherent paradox of adultery: The philandering husband is aware of both the damage he's inflicting on his family and the fact that what he's doing can't end well. But he continues. Veering into Ingmar Bergman territory, the characters' various tug-of-wars and confessions are played with an almost terrifying plausibility, and every cut is precisely judged.

Is this Romania's year at Cannes again, as it was in 2007? This morning brought us Aurora, the long-awaited new film from Cristi Puiu, the director of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which observed the title character's death from a hematoma (and the indifference of the Romanian medical bureaucracy) in near–real time. That masterful tightrope walk is a tough act to follow, and the mostly excellent new film doesn't quite live up, but it does make brilliant use—over three hours—of what might be termed "deliberate boredom." Although the movie was five years in the making, you could be forgiven for thinking that Puiu had seen last year's Police, Adjective and thought he could make a better film about a man—well, walking around. (It's best not to give the plot away.) Designed to lull the audience into complacency—with gunshots and train passings apparently timed, as a colleague noted, to rouse anyone who's fallen asleep—the movie gradually uses its metal-worker protagonist's story as a springboard for another dark comedy about inefficiency. But this time, Puiu proves even more merciless in his eagerness to taunt his viewers—in a good way. Here's an alternate title: Police, Passive Verb.