Cannes 2010: Has class consciousness become the festival through-line?

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Class consciousness has certainly stormed the Croisette this season.
First there was ‘Robin Hood,’ or ‘Robin du Bois,’ as it’s known here, with Russell Crowe playing the mythic figure as a freedom fighter bent to take down King John, who taxes his people indiscriminately to pay for foolish foreign adventures. Then there’s Oliver Stone’s ‘Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,’ in which the baddies are ethically challenged Wall Street billionaires. Now comes ‘The Housemaid,’ a South Korean twist on the same theme, about a young, naive maid who’s seduced by her Korean master, a wine-swilling, Beethoven-playing Korean Master of the Universe.

A piece of lurid fun, ‘The Housemaid’ is actually a remake of a famous 1960 Korean film that stormed that nation the year it premiered. The 2010 edition has a certain kitschy flair, with some exceptionally tony villainess — i.e. the master’s doll-like wife and her manipulative mother who have a positively lethal hissy fit when they discover their maid is pregnant.

Hollywood films tend to finesse class differences to the point of erasure. For instance, in ‘Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,’ the hero is Shia LaBeouf, who’s character ostensibly grew up poor. Yet once the movie actually begins, he’s a loaded young trader who loves fast motorcycles. By contrast, ‘The Housemaid’ presents a vision of feudal-like servitude amid modern-day Korean oligarchs, a condition that ultimately enrages those on the lower end of the social spectrum. Director Im Sang-Soo is clearly a devotee of Hitchcock, so the anti-elitist furor goes down with spooky, spine-tingling panache.

— Rachel Abramowitz