Are standing ovations at film festivals getting out of hand?

The Venice premiere of Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door received 17 minutes of applause – has touting the length of clapping has become just another PR tool?

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. Continue reading...


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