Camp, glam and undeniably kitsch, the opening ceremonies are, in a way, so different from the raw machismo and power of the sports themselves. And yet, as Claire Balding announced at the commencement of the BBC’s coverage of the show, they are “nearly always the most watched part of an Olympic games.” And Paris’s show – long, winding, and frequently gravely dull – gave that vast audience a new twist.
There is a sense of one-upmanship inherent in the Olympic ceremonies, which peaked over the 2008 and 2012 games. Beijing’s curtain-raiser – considered one of the greatest theatrical spectacles ever mounted – was a $100m propaganda extravaganza. It was followed, in 2012, by a Danny Boyle-directed schmaltz-fest, Isles of Wonder, within Stratford’s Olympic stadium. But Rio, in 2016, couldn’t match the sheer scale of these performances, and the less said about the damp squib Tokyo Olympics the better. Could Paris restore some pride to proceedings?
Thomas Jolly, the actor and theatre director given the reins as Artistic Director of the ceremony, called tonight’s show an opportunity to “illustrate the richness and plurality shaped by [Paris’s] history”. The centrepiece of events was – for the first time – not a stadium associated with the games, but the magnificent Seine, the river which snakes through the French capital. It has been noted that the word “Seine” is a near-perfect homophone for the French word “scène”, meaning, fittingly, “stage”.
It was a stage that snaked from the Austerlitz Bridge to the Trocadero Palace. The challenge faced by Jolly and his flotilla was an aesthetic one. The Seine is a beautiful river (if not quite as grand as the Thames, I demur, as a Londoner), and Paris a beautiful city. But French weather is scarcely less fickle than the British climate, and as the torchbearers set off down the Traversée de Paris, the “City of Light”, as Hazel Irvine introduced it, was bathed in cloud. The drizzle, always a threat, held off for only a few minutes. “No sparkle on the Seine,” Andrew Cotter opined as the speckling turned to a downpour.
The evening opened with a skit in which the legendary footballer Zinedine “Zizou” Zidane was chased through the Paris Métro, Olympic torch in hand, by a cartoonish trio of schoolkids. These children then emerged into the grey light of day, carrying the torch to the Austerlitz bridge, the starting point for the parade. Lit up by a smoke Tricolore, the bridge, named for Napoleon’s victory in the Battle of the Three Emperors, served as the entranceway for barges bearing exuberant athletes. Greece first, as per tradition, followed by the refugee team, and then the varied and colourful nations competing in the games.
As the armada of requisitioned sightseeing vessels paraded down the river, the banks played host to great French musical icons like, er, Lady Gaga and – checks notes – Celine Dion. Gaga introduced a splash of colour to the ceremony on the murky waters. An extensive clean-up operation had been undertaken to make the Seine – a notoriously unsanitary body of water – fit for purpose. Paris’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, even went for a dip, to prove the success of these purifying procedures. “A little cool but not so bad,” was Hidalgo’s verdict after a stunt that evoked images, for me at least, of John Gummer making his daughter eat a hamburger at the height of BSE mania.
So, what symbolised France, in the tableaus performed along the route? Can-cans, the reconstruction of Notre-Dame, Louis Vuitton, Les Misérables, ballet, a heavy metal interpolation of the Habanera from Carmen, New Wave cinema, ménages à trois, Aya Nakamura, the Louvre, Debussy, Ravel, Jacques Cousteau, Minions in berets, “La Marseillaise”, drag, and an Assassin’s Creed adjacent torchbearer (Ubisoft are a French company, I guess). All of this was shot through an increasingly bleary lens, spattered with the rain that no amount of preparation could control.
“It is an egalitarian procession,” Cotter remarked drily, as the French broadcast feed immediately cut from Grand Bretagne to Grenada. No matter: as any viewer of an Olympic opening ceremony will know, the parade of the nations is the exhausting part where you drain cups of tea like they’re shots of vodka (or vice versa). But Jolly’s ambition for the show meant the foregrounding of the procession; the dancing and music, where it came, was a break from merry Mauritians or beaming Botswanans. But the splashy catwalk over the river – where haute couture revellers worked their angles – couldn’t distract Irvine and Cotter from the delivery of inane facts about every country on earth.
The sun could not set quickly enough, as the rain drove down. By the time the French team arrived on the scéne, half-darkness had descended upon the city and the clouds were, finally, masked. After hours of procession – from Albania to Zimbabwe – the relief at the sight of the French vessel, the last, was only temporary. From there, viewers were treated to 45 minutes of creative vamping, before the Olympic flag was raised (upside down). During that period, the ceremony’s DJ treated viewers to a tribute to the European Union, soundtracked by GALA’s “Freed from Desire”, and a breakdancing sequence to Noughties club anthem “Sandstorm”.
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“A great, big melange,” was how Irvine described the show laid on for them. Given the setting, it had not been possible to do a dress rehearsal and so the broadcasters were, at times, just as in the dark (or the driving rain) as the rest of us. Not least when the Olympic flame disappeared back away from the Eiffel Tower, where it had been expected to reside, to its final resting place in the Tuileries. The most striking images of the show – like the animatronic horse that galloped down the Seine – all suffered from the interminable nature of the course. Only the hot air balloon finish – a tribute to the Montgolfier brothers – appeared with both grandeur and alacrity.
Too much filler, too little killer. And whoever decided to predicate the visual success of the ceremony on the Parisian weather displayed either intense hubris or a baffling lack of guile. Which was it? Well, the funny thing about the French is that they don’t have a word for naïveté.