For decades, the Palme d’Or was the most prestigious award that the Cannes Film Festival could bestow. But there’s a new honor that many films appear to be vying for: Which movie can earn the longest standing ovation?
The ovations here have always been supersized, but in recent years, industry outlets like Deadline, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter have turned the duration of the applause into a competitive spectacle. Headlines crow that “The History of Sound” (starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor) earned a nine-minute ovation, “Alpha” (Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to “Titane”) was applauded for 12 minutes, and “Sentimental Value” (from Joachim Trier) earned a stunning 19-minute ovation. A Palme pecking order is then heavily implied.
As someone who covers Oscar season, I understand the temptation to turn artistic achievements into a horse race. Still, when it comes to the way these standing ovations are reported, appearances can be deceiving.
First, some background. After a film’s closing credits conclude at Cannes, a camera is trained on the cast and director, broadcasting their reactions on the huge screen in the Grand Théâtre Lumière. It’s customary for the camera operator to isolate each actor in close-up for individual moments of applause, meaning that larger ensembles often garner the longest ovations. If the actors are then willing to interact with each other and reshuffle into new pairings, the ovation can be especially prolonged.
But it’s important to note that the director has the option to end things at any point by giving a speech, and some filmmakers, like Bong Joon Ho and Wes Anderson, are uncomfortable letting the adulation go on for too long. When “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” premiered at Cannes last week, the applause only stopped because the director Christopher McQuarrie grabbed a mic, paid tribute to his cast, then led them out of the theater. (If he had instead prodded Tom Cruise to climb the rafters of the Lumière, we could have been looking at a record-breaking ovation.)
Media outlets differ on whether to include the length of the director’s speech as part of the ovation, which is why you often see conflicting reports on the final total. For example, though Variety claimed the “Mission: Impossible” applause lasted five minutes, Deadline reported that the ovation went on for seven and a half. And should the applause that begins over the end credits count, even if no one is technically standing yet? I’ve sat next to the reporters who time these ovations, and there appears to be no formal consensus as to how it should work.
Ultimately, with a system that can so easily be exploited, the length of a standing ovation often boils down to one question: How much is the talent willing to milk it? Take last year’s “Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1,” a western that was written, directed, produced and partly financed by its star, Kevin Costner. As you might imagine by the amount of times his name appeared in the credits, Costner was happy to bask in the applause after the premiere, drawing an 11-minute ovation from the crowd that belied the film’s mixed reviews.
With a festival as over the top as Cannes, it’s easy to get swept up in the emotion of a standing ovation: After the Tuesday premiere of Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, “Eleanor the Great,” it was moving to see minutes of applause for the film’s 95-year-old star, June Squibb. Still, it’s worth being skeptical of the reporting that accompanies those ovations. At Cannes, applause isn’t just earned — in many ways, it’s engineered.
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
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