Nicole Kidman, dubbed 'Queen of Cannes' when the annual festival began two weeks ago, was awarded a specially-created '70th Anniversary Prize' when the festival winners were announced on Sunday night.
The Australian star appeared in three films in the official selection and in Jane Campion's Top of the Lake: China Girl, which was shown out of competition.
Kidman had already gone home to Nashville, but American jury member Will Smith stepped up to accept it on her behalf and gave a brief impression of her thanking Cannes and then bursting into tears. At that point a video of the real Nicole Kidman, no longer in her red-carpet gear but looking as poised as always, was beamed into the Grande Lumiere Theatre.
"I'm sad I can't be there!" she said after thanking everyone at the festival and the directors who had chosen her for roles. "But it is what it is. I'm with my family. But I can say 'Je t'aime! Merci! Bonne Soiree!"
Kidman was the second Australian luminary to be awarded at the festival in its closing days.
On Friday, Australian cinematographer and occasional director Chris Doyle received the Pierre Angenieux ExcelLens in Cinematography at a ceremony followed by an extravagantly formal dinner somewhat at odds with Doyle's own ramshackle persona.
Doyle, who has lived for most of his professional life in Hong Kong and is particularly admired for his work for Wong Kar-Wai, was clearly moved by the recognition. That did not stop him telling people at the dinner that he appreciated the prize - a camera lens he says is worth US$50,000 - "because I can hire it out if I don't have a job".
The festival's awards night, which is brisk but always oddly thrilling, reminded everyone that a programme that often felt disappointing day by day, in fact, added up to a fortnight of impressive cinema.
Pedro Almodovar's jury gave the top award, the Palme D'or, to Swedish director Ruben Ostlund's The Square, an acerbic view of bourgeois pretensions, male vanity and small betrayals set in a contemporary art gallery.
Asked whether he had seen any of the other films in competition, Ostlund said he hadn't but that there were many directors on the list whom he admired. "I would like to share a Palme with Michael Haneke," he said. Then he paused briefly. "That's not true," he said. "I don't want to share it with Michael Haneke at all. It's mine, all mine!"
Two of the films in which Nicole Kidman starred received awards: Yorgos Lanthimos's unsettling, surreal revenge drama The Killing of the Sacred Deer shared the script prize, and Sofia Coppola won the Best Director's award for The Beguiled, in which Kidman plays the headmistress of a girl's boarding school during the American Civil War who takes in a wounded enemy soldier.
Coppola, only the second woman to win the festival's directing prize after Soviet director Yuliya Solntseva in 1961, had also returned to the United States, but sent a note in which she thanked, among others, Jane Campion "for being a role model and supporting women film-makers".
Lanthimos shared the script award with Scottish director Lynne Ramsay, whose drama You Were Never Really There, about a hired killer who rescues a little girl from a paedophile ring, won the Best Actor award for Joaquin Phoenix's simmering but almost silent performance.
The Best Actress award went to Diane Kruger, who performed in her native German for the first time in Fatih Akin's In the Fade. This was another story of grievance and revenge, based on a real German case in which neo-Nazis blew up a small Turkish-German citizens' advice office but were freed due to inconclusive evidence.
Two films had been widely tipped to win; in the event, neither did.
A hyper-realist but fictional account of Act-Up's campaigns in France to get government and Big Pharma to address the AIDS crisis in the '80s, Robin Campillo's 120 Beats Per Minute, was a frantic, kinetic yet perfectly controlled story of a political struggle that was made to feel very personal.
The other hot contender was Andrey Zvyagintsev's Loveless, which follows the disappearance of a boy who overhears his parents planning to separate and divorce and put him in an orphanage. Woven into this intense narrative was a blood-curdling sense of creeping materialism and selfishness, a "state-of-the-nation" lament echoed in several Russian films across the festival, not just in competition.
Even if they were not much reflected in the awards, Russia and refugees were the festival's talking points. Overwhelming those contemporary hot-button subjects in the awarded films, however, it was the enduring subject of the beastliness of the bourgeoisie that won the day.
