The real story behind those ’20-minute standing ovations’ at Cannes Film Festival
It's very clearly not the way to measure a film's quality or impact.
Every year we do it, without fail, even though fans and critics moan about it, and it’s quite clearly a reductive way of measuring a movie’s impact.
However, we simply just can’t seem to help ourselves in timing and then reporting on the length of standing ovations at Cannes Film Festival.
This year, film fans around the world have been obsessing over the 19-minute standing ovation for Sentimental Value, and the 11.5 minutes of applause French director Julia Ducournau’s Alpha received.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme both received an impressive seven-and-a-half-minute ovation, while Die, My Love starring Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence received a fantastic nine-minute ovation.
It’s the biggest con in cinema, but at each festival (and this happens at Venice International Film Festival too, but Cannes seems to be the biggest proponent) every major film being shown has its rapturous (or sometimes, just polite) applause monitored from its premiere.
Even if you’ve never been in the 2,000-plus-seater Grand Théâtre Lumière on the Croisette, where each premiere is held after the stars and filmmakers ascend those famous, red-carpeted stairs, it must seem a slightly odd if not antiquated measure of success.
True, applause is both welcome and expected as a traditional measure of appreciation – but to predict a film’s entire box office run and reception from a wide audience on this alone, usually ranking them in duration order like an Oscars haul? Bizarre.
And as anyone can tell you who has been there, as it happens… it’s totally meaningless.
Cannes Film Festival has become known for its standing ovations and how generously they are given out at each of the event’s premieres (Picture: AFP via Getty Images) The ovations are regularly timed and reported on, to create some sort of unofficial and arbitrary ranking of the movies (Picture: AFP via Getty Images)
