CANNES, France, May 26, (Agencies): Mississippi drama “Mud” and South Korea’s “The Taste of Money” on Saturday joined tales of love, crime and economic crisis as the last of 22 films vying for the top prize in Cannes. The Palme d’Or will be handed out at a star-studded gala on Sunday evening at the close of the 12-day movie marathon that saw some of the world’s top directors showcase their latest work at the glitzy French Riviera festival. Previous Cannes gold winners Michael Haneke of Austria and Romanian Cristian Mungiu were among the names bandied about as potential prize-winners, along with Frenchman Jacques Audiard and Australian Andrew Dominik. They marched up the fabled — and this year often rain-soaked — red carpet alongside A-list celebrities such as Nicole Kidman, “Twilight” heart-throb Robert Pattinson, and Marion Cotillard. Festival artistic director Thierry Fremaux, who ahead of the event faced controversy for failing to pick a single woman director for the main competition, on Friday stuck by his line-up after critics said Cannes too often saw the same small group of film-makers.

Complain
“The fact that film-makers who have already won prizes find themselves on the list again is not a problem. Do people complain when Rafael Nadal wins the Roland Garros (tennis tournament) seven times?” he told AFP.
Cannes regulars in town this year include Haneke, Mungiu, Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami and Mexican Carlos Reygadas, with Britain’s Ken Loach in competition for a record 11th time.
Mungiu, who took Cannes gold in 2007 with the chilling Communist-era abortion drama “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”, this year presented “Beyond the Hills”, the true story of a deadly “exorcism”.
The film was joint leader of the pack in Screen International’s daily compilation of ratings by critics from across the world when the magazine delivered its final list on Thursday.
The other film was the French-language “Love” by Haneke, who scooped the festival’s top award in 2009 for “The White Ribbon”.

The new work casts French screen icon Jean-Louis Trintignant as a devoted octogenarian husband caring for his dying wife in a wrenching cinematic study of love at the bitter end.
Trintignant, whose consummate performance sees torment seep quietly from each pore of his aged face, was being tipped by many festival-goers for a potential best actor prize.
Another hot Palme contender was Audiard’s “Rust and Bone”, with Marion Cotillard as a killer-whale trainer who loses both legs but finds her way back to life and love with help from bare-knuckle fighter Ali, played by Belgian Matthias Schoenaerts in a breakout performance.
Nicole Kidman brought major league star power to the Palme race in US director Lee Daniels’ “The Paperboy”, a steamy film noir in which she sizzles as a trashy blonde of a certain age.
The Australian actress got a second major outing in Cannes on Friday, this time in the out-of-competition “Hemingway and Gellhorn” in which she plays one of the 20th century’s most respected war correspondents.
Brad Pitt, another Hollywood heavyweight, returned to Cannes as a humane hitman in Andrew Dominik’s “Killing Them Softly,” an anti-capitalist gangster movie that delivers a damning indictment of the state of the American nation.

Troubles
Pitt was the star of last year’s Palme winner, “The Tree of Life”, Terrence Malick’s film about life on earth and the troubles of a 1950s Texas family.
“The Hunt”, a taut psychological thriller by Denmark’s Thomas Vinterberg with Mads Mikkelsen as a man falsely accused of molesting a child, has also emerged as a front-runner in the race for festival gold.
Money, sex and stretch limos abound in Cronenberg’s “Cosmopolis” which has Robert Pattinson as a billionaire financier looking for a haircut as a killer stalks him.
But the film got mixed reviews from Cannes critics, as did an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s cult novel “On the Road” directed by Brazilian Walter Salles and starring Sam Riley, Kristen Stewart, Kirsten Dunst and Viggo Mortensen.
“Moonrise Kingdom”, a bittersweet American family romp by Wes Anderson with an all-star cast about the thrill and sting of first love, delighted audiences as it opened the festival on May 16.
The last two competition films to premiere on Saturday were “Mud”, a Huckleberry Finn-like tale by Jeff Nichols about two boys, a fugitive, and the Mississippi river, and Korean Im Sang-Soo’s “The Taste of Money”.

To have one film competing at the Cannes Film Festival is a privilege. To have two, Matthew McConaughey says, is wonderful good fortune — and the reward for a spell of hard labor in the trenches of independent cinema.
In Lee Daniels’ steamy Southern noir “The Paperboy,” McConaughey plays a journalist who returns to his Florida hometown to investigate a murder.
McConaughey laughs when asked if having two movies competing for the Palme d’Or gives him divided loyalties.
“That would be a high-class problem,” he said. “I’m really, really endeared to both of them for different reasons — and they’re very, very different from each other.
“I’m very honored. I’ve got two films that I’m proud of, two experiences that I really loved, and I’ve got two characters that I really care about.”
The two films take the Texas-born actor on a tour of the US South — and of men on society’s margins. In “The Paperboy,” McConaughey’s Ward James is a crusading reporter with dark depths to his psyche that imperil his quest for the truth.
His title character in “Mud” is being hunted as a dangerous fugitive, but may be a wild innocent driven by love.

Critics have hailed McConaughey’s turn in “Mud,” and director Daniels said he was wowed by McConaughey’s nuanced performance in “The Paperboy.”
“I’m so happy that he’s so understated in the film,” Daniels said. “There were moments when I didn’t recognize Matthew.”
McConaughey said the roles were the result of a decision to “shake things up” in a career that has seen him take leads in a mixed bag of romcoms (“Failure to Launch,” ‘’Fool’s Gold”) — and, as he noted at Cannes, play lots of lawyers, in films from “A Time to Kill” to “The Lincoln Lawyer.”
“I was looking for some characters that didn’t necessarily pander to convention, or even didn’t pander to plot,” he said, long legs stretched out on a sofa in a Cannes hotel. “They’re all kind of characters that live on the fringe, on the outskirts of society. But they’re really human characters.
McConaughey’s Cannes double-header is the product of remarkable year of work that saw him shoot five independent films with strikingly different directors.
As well as “The Paperboy” and “Mud,” he was a sheriff in Richard Linklater’s dark comedy “Bernie,” a club owner in Steven Soderbergh’s male-stripper movie “Magic Mike” and a hitman in William Friedkin’s thriller “Killer Joe.”

The 42-year-old actor has never been busier — or, it seems, happier.
It was also an education in modern American cinema from five filmmakers with strong personal styles.
“Friedkin, you’d do one take, maybe two,” McConaughey said. “Usually one. Soderbergh: minimalist. He’s more of a shaper.
“With Linklater — this was our third time working together. We do all this character work together. ... We have a shorthand together.”
McConaughey will find out Sunday, when the film festival wraps up, whether either of his Cannes films has taken a prize.
Next up, he hopes, is “The Dallas Buyers’ Club,” a drama based on a true story about illegal AIDS drugs in the 1980s that he’s long sought to make with director Jean-Marc Vallee.
A sex-infused expose of rampant corruption among the super-rich in today’s South Korea premiered at Cannes Film Festival Saturday, but the director slammed the Western view of Asian cinema.
Im Sang-Soo presented his seventh film “The Taste of Money”, one of 22 in the race for the Cannes top prize to be awarded Sunday at a gala ceremony.
It is only the second entry from Asia, following fellow Korean Hong Sang-soo’s “In Another Country” starring Isabelle Huppert.

Saga
“The Taste of Money” is the follow-up to the 2010 Cannes contender “The Housemaid” tracing the saga of a massively wealthy but highly dysfunctional family and the decent but compromised people who work for them.
The clan’s patriarch is addicted to sex with the servants and openly indulges his appetites, feeling his way up the Filipina housekeeper Eva’s skirt at the family dinner table and later ravishing her in his bedroom which his wife has equipped with spy cameras.
The domineering wife has long tolerated his womanising but when her husband declares that he will give up everything to live with Eva and her two children, whom he has flown in to Korea from the Philippines, she swings into action.
Coercing her husband’s handsome young assistant into her bed, she then uses the employee to consolidate the power of the family empire and exact revenge on her husband, known as the Chairman.
The soap opera unfolds in the family’s sumptuous ultra-modern estate, where the walls are covered in contemporary Western art and the French red wine flows freely.
Im told AFP that he took inspiration from Balzac, Shakespeare and Hitchcock in constructing his portrait of South Korea’s current infatuation with money and the corrosive influence of excessive power.
“The view of South Korean society I present is sad but true. At the moment you have big companies like Samsung and Hyundai operating without any sense of their own responsibilities in Korean society,” he said.
“I wanted to show how ordinary people live in that society and who are they are in this context.”

Poor
Im said that the specifically South Korean themes in the film must be seen in a global context, with Westerners as role models and poor newcomers from other parts of Asia are there to be exploited.
“The ultra-rich in Korea see themselves as emperors. But their history only goes back 50 years so they seek to imitate European aristocrats,” he said.
“The problems in South Korea also have an international aspect because the lowest rung of South Korean society is occupied by immigrants — in the case of the film, Filipinos.”
Im is known for lengthy soft-core sex scenes with all the main characters winding up in at least one steamy tryst.
Without citing examples, Im said he generally “detested” the type of Asian cinema celebrated at international festivals like Cannes, which delivered a view of the continent that appealed to Western fantasies.

Im argued that a failure to look at other cultures on their own terms helped breed the rage that fed international terrorism.
“This separation from The Other is the reason why you had September 11 attacks because they (Westerners) did not really want to know what happens in other countries,” he said.
Going back to what he does best, David Cronenberg takes a visceral day-trip inside the cushioned limousine of a tycoon who cares little for the bloody, populist riots that explode outside his car in “Cosmopolis.”
All the young multi-billionaire Eric Packer — played by a steely-eyed Robert Pattinson — wants is a haircut.
Packer spends the entire film, which premiered Friday in Cannes, crossing town to get one but is waylaid when the US president’s visit to the city causes traffic chaos. Yet when he eventually makes it to the barber, his haircut is interrupted and he leaves in futility, half-shaven.

For Cronenberg, a master of provocation, the significance of this probably goes beyond a debate on the quality of haircuts at barber shops — though judging by Pattinson’s slick red-carpet hair, it is probable he opted for a stylist.
In the surreal “Cosmopolis,” — full of long, introspective dialogue — the portrayal of cold, moneyed arrogance is a warning against the perceived greed of current times.
The oversexed, 28-year-old Packer has made his billions as an asset manager in a dystopian Manhattan and is so self-obsessed he barely registers the violent protests against capitalism around him. The only time Packer seems worried is after a doctor tells him, in one of the movie’s many comic moments, that he has an “asymmetrical prostate” — with prostate-gazing an obvious synonym for navel-gazing.
Pattison — who is most famous for playing a vampire in the teen “Twilight” series — said he was nervous about the complex role.

“I spent two weeks in my hotel room worrying,” he said, joking that “actors aren’t meant to be intelligent.”
But the ego and cynicism stretch beyond his character and infect the whole landscape.
The film starts with a quote: “a rat becomes the unit of currency,” that turns out to be true for the movie’s characters, who all seem to be part of a individualistic “rat race” each struggling to get his or her 15 minutes of fame.
The last scene sees a claustrophobic 22-minute face-off between Packer and a crazed man trying to assassinate him, played with standout brilliance by Paul Giamatti. The two talk on a couch, separated by a screen that Cronenberg said conjures up images of a Catholic confessional, exploring how selfish the world is.

The film was based on a 2003 book by Don DeLillo, who was at the Cannes Film Festival alongside Cronenberg and said the film’s dialogue was directly lifted from the novel. Still, at many points, the drawn-out dialogue seemed to have more elements of a play and the movie dragged.
At the post-screening press conference, Cronenberg justified with aplomb the film’s introspective qualities. “For me, the essence of cinema is a person, a face, speaking.”
Pattinson said he loves Cronenberg’s other films — which include the 2011 “A Dangerous Method” — but the Canadian director said “I always had the feeling he’d never seen any of my movies.”
The film has drawn inevitable comparisons to current financial woes and the timeless themes of greed vs. poverty and populist anger, but Cronenberg said any link to current affairs was accidental. Still, the shooting did coincide with global anti-capitalist protests that began in late 2011.
DeLillo said he wrote “Cosmopolis” after being struck by the massive gap between rich and poor in Manhattan.

“New York City streets at the turn of the century seemed suddenly filled up with white stretch limousines,” he said.
“The hope is embodied in the fact that the movie got made in the first place,” Cronenberg said with a dry smile. “It’s not an easy movie to get financed. In Hollywood, $200 million is spent on movies that are extremely conservative, not-edgy. The hope is in the art.”
The longest-running entry in this year’s Cannes festival, a five-hour Indian gangster epic, won a warm welcome at the Riviera event, even drawing parallels with Quentin Tarantino.
Anurag Kashyap, who directed the five hour 20 minute “Gangs of Wasseypur”, described the film to AFP as “a Bollywood-influenced gangster epic, part Western, part documentary.”
With a folk-meets-dubstep soundtrack and a basis in true stories, the film follows three generations of coal and scrap-trade mafia gangs in a suburb in east India who are obsessed with traditional Hindi cinema.
The two-part film screened this week in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar section of the Cannes festival, to strong reviews.

Terriers Banjo and Poppy — one of whom plunges to its death onto a knot of knitting needles — on Friday jointly took Cannes’ unofficial Palm Dog award for celluloid canine talent.
The pair, whose real names are Smurf and Ged and who feature in British black comedy “Sightseers”, are building on a terrier tradition that began last year with Dog triumph for one of their breed who later went on to Oscar glory.
The hounds were unable to attend the prize-giving ceremony but the trophy — a diamante collar with the words Palm Dog stitched into it — was presented to members of the “Sightseers” crew at a high-kitsch beachfront ceremony.
Nicole Kidman got a second major outing in Cannes on Friday, this time playing a war correspondent who waged her own battle against Ernest Hemingway as the literary lovers roamed the world.
Much of “Hemingway and Gellhorn” deals with the trip by the US writer, played by British actor Clive Owen, and the journalist to Spain during that country’s brutal civil war in the late 1930s.

Role
The Australian actress told AFP that she dedicated her role in the new film, which got its Cannes red carpet premiere Friday, to a US woman reporter for Britain’s Sunday Times who was killed this year in Syria.
“I dedicated my performance of Martha to Marie Colvin, the journalist killed in Syria, because I really see her as someone similar to Martha. These women are still rare and Martha was the first,” she said.
Colvin was killed along with French photographer Remi Ochlik on February 22 when a building that served as a makeshift media centre in the Syrian city of Homs was struck by a Syrian army mortar.
Kidman stars in a second film presented this week in Cannes, Lee Daniels’ film noir “The Paperboy”, which is in the running for the Palme d’Or top prize.
“Hemingway and Gellhorn”, an HBO television channel film directed by Philip Kaufman and screened in Cannes out of competition, begins with the pair’s first meeting in Sloppy Joe’s bar in Key West in Florida.
Hemingway already had a serious reputation as a novel writer but while she had done some highly-praised journalism, she had not yet done any foreign reporting.

Travelling
They finally got married in 1940 after travelling in Europe while Hemingway wrote his “For Whom The Bell Tolls” novel, for which Gellhorn was the inspiration.
Their travels also took them to China and they lived together off and on for several years in their villa near the Cuban capital Havana.
Kaufman, whose film depicts the hard-drinking Hemingway growing resentful of her frequent trips without him, cast a host of stars in supporting roles, including David Strathairn, Parker Posey, and Peter Coyote.
Gellhorn covered almost every major world conflict in her 60-year career, and witnessed the D-Day landings — to get there she impersonated a stretcher bearer — that saw the Allies begin to win Europe back from the Nazis.

She was also among the first reporters to get to Dachau concentration camp after it was liberated.
Kidman said she was also glad that the film might help bring Gellhorn out of Hemingway’s shadow.
A star-studded Cannes gala attended by the likes of Kylie Minogue and Janet Jackson has raised a record-breaking nine million euros ($11 million) for AIDS research, organisers said Friday.
Kirsten Dunst, Zac Efron, Alec Baldwin and Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld were among the 980 glitterati at the event held Thursday night on the sidelines of the Riviera film festival by the American AIDS research foundation amfAR.
Aishwarya Rai Bachchan says she’s is happy with herself and her weight — a rare combination in the world of celebrities.
The Indian actress was at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday night, where she walked the red carpet in an elegant cream-and-gold sari to attend the amfAR Cinema Against AIDS auction.
Fans were eager to see if the former Miss World was back in shape after giving birth to her daughter Aaradhya last year, but she said she doesn’t worry about that. There have been some cruel comments made online about her weight but Rai Bachchan says she simply tries to avoid the Internet on that topic.