For any film lovers who aren’t currently at the Venice film festival and want to play along at home, here’s something to try. Pop in a DVD of your favourite Pedro Almodóvar film – or your least favourite, or one you think is merely OK, since it makes little difference for this exercise. Watch the film through and, as the closing credits begin to roll, set the stopwatch on your phone, rise to your feet and start clapping. Keep clapping until your hands are sore, your feet are sore, or you simply get bored – whichever comes first. Pause the stopwatch and see how long you made it. A minute? Two if you were really stretching yourself?
If so, I’m afraid to say you’re not quite festival-ready. When Almodóvar’s new film The Room Next Door – his first English-language feature, and not a peak-form affair – premiered at Venice on Monday evening, it brought the crowd to its feet for a whopping 17 minutes of applause, almost a sixth of the running time of the film itself. It was comfortably the longest ovation of the festival so far, something I can say with some certainty now that the timing of clapping at festivals like Venice and Cannes has become an entertainment-news fixture, with the length of the ovation after each major premiere meriting its own headline in trade papers such as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.
Thanks to such coverage, I can inform you with some specificity that Almodóvar’s ovation broke the record set for this year’s festival, only the night before, by American film-maker Brady Corbet’s muscular, rapturously reviewed midcentury epic The Brutalist, which clocked 13 minutes of applause. (Proportionally, at least, that seems more reasonable, given that Corbet’s film runs a whopping 215 minutes including a quarter-hour interval.) Last night they gave Luca Guadagnino’s sweaty Daniel Craig drama 11 minutes.
Those figures already made the single-digit tallies earned by well-received films earlier in the festival – seven minutes for Halina Reijn’s provocative Nicole Kidman vehicle Babygirl, eight for Angelina Jolie in Pablo Larraín’s Callas biopic Maria – look restrained by comparison.
The escalation suggests that coverage of the subject only encourages longer ovations as the festival wears on, surely to the delight of showbiz editors. Still the pattern can be stalled: a couple of nights ago, Apple TV+’s slight Brad Pitt-George Clooney comedy Wolfs earned a four-minute ovation, barely the length of the closing credits. That’s surprisingly brief considering the star power involved – Clooney, especially, is a veritable honorary citizen of Venice – even if four minutes of clapping in almost any other context would seem a bit of a chore. Sometimes a curtailed ovation is a polite way for the assembled audience to deliver a collective “meh” verdict on what they’ve just seen.
What about no ovation at all, you ask? Close to unthinkable. Just as standing applause, once a marker of exceptional audience enthusiasm, is now to be expected at the end of any West End show, the festival ovation is a formality at any high-level premiere where the talent is in attendance – if only to acknowledge their presence and effort in bringing a film to the festival in the first place, all the more so if they’re already celebrated and beloved figures.
Perhaps the audience at The Room Next Door really was that stirred by Almodóvar’s somewhat stilted but nonetheless affecting euthanasia drama, but surely over half of those 17 minutes were simply for the universally adored Spanish director himself, resplendent in a candy-pink suit, and his stars Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, both grandes dames of the modern cinema and esteemed veterans of the festival. Who wouldn’t clap for that trio, regardless of the work just presented? In contrast, the lengthy ovation for The Brutalist feels a little more driven by the film itself: Corbet is talented but hardly a legend just yet, while his film is the kind of vastly ambitious, imposing opus that courts reverence in such environments.
All of which is to say that standing ovations at film festivals can mean different things in different contexts, but mostly they mean nothing at all regarding a film’s long-term prospects. Famously, Lee Daniels’ critically reviled (though, for this critic, trashily fabulous) 2012 thriller The Paperboy enjoyed a vigorous 15-minute ovation at its Cannes premiere after having been roundly booed at its press screening earlier that day. (Today, the film is mostly forgotten but has cultivated a small, adoring cult: let’s say that both the critics and the Cannes clappers may have gone too far.) The rumour was that The Paperboy’s studio publicists, rattled by the critical drubbing, planted ringers at the premiere to keep the applause going for as long as possible, thus turning around the film’s media narrative, if only for one day.
Standing ovations, whether polite or impassioned, have always been a tradition of festivals. In recent years, however, it feels as if they’ve become rather more of a publicity game. Film news outlets run stories about ovations because they’re an easy and clickbaity way to convey festival buzz to casual readers – not least because it sets up a numerical, comparison-friendly metric that grabs attention in the age of all-important (but equally dubious) Rotten Tomatoes scores. That more serious-minded cinephiles on social media like to mock such stories and the implied relevance of the standing-o metric only helps traffic.
It’s no longer just headline-hungry journos discreetly hitting their stopwatches as the lights come up, however: some PRs and sales agents are doing so too. At Cannes, I was surprised to get a press release email from leading world-cinema sales company The Match Factory, touting the length of the ovation for Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz’s deliciously sweaty erotic thriller Motel Destino. (I wish I could tell you how long it was, but I deleted the email.) Perhaps this wasn’t a first, but it felt to me like an intriguing marker of one reliable press angle crossing over to the other side of the industry. Then again, Motel Destino received mixed reviews at the festival, and won no prizes. Sometimes, in this business, the sound of many hands clapping is the most noise you have.
