The Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony Was a Mess
Successfully, that was a pleasing thought in idea. Paris held the first-ever Olympics opening ceremony to occur outdoor a stadium—and on certainly one of many loveliest settings on this planet, the Seine. Athletes paraded not by foot nonetheless by boat, waving flags from trendy cruising pontoons, as pageantry unfolded on bridges and riverbanks. The aquatic format promised to do further than merely showcase the architectural beauty of Paris or convey the magic of strolling all through the Pont Neuf with latest bread in hand. It promised to provide the world—our ever further jaded, content-drowned world—one factor new to take a look at.
Sadly, that new issue was a big quantity. Some will blame the rain, which soaked the festivities for hours, together with an air of tragedy as athletes waved flags from inside their ponchos. Nevertheless even on a sunnier day, the ceremony would have served for example of not stage a spectacle for dwell TV. The vitality was low, the pacing bizarre, and the execution patchy. Paris tried to endeavor itself as a up to date, inclusive hub of delight—nonetheless it principally merely appeared exhausted.
Olympics opening ceremonies are inevitably ridiculous affairs, usually in a gratifying technique. The host nation ought to welcome the worldwide group whereas cobbling all of the signifiers of its private identification into some sort of romping medley that moreover, ideally, expands that nation’s image in helpful strategies. London offered the Queen and James Bond, and as well as a tribute to the Nationwide Properly being Service. Rio hosted a rumbling dance get collectively along with a briefing on Brazil’s Indigenous historic previous. Most important, every of those cities gave us good TV.
Beforehand, the Paris event’s ingenious director, Thomas Jolly, launched his intentions to play with Gallic clichés. Key phrases—liberté, synchronicité, and so forth—launched thematic chapters, nonetheless a narrative hardly cohered. Congratulations for many who had the subsequent in your bingo card: mimes, Louis Vuitton, parkour, Les Misérables, the cancan, lasers capturing out of the Eiffel Tower, allusions to ménages à trois. Nevertheless credit score rating the place it’s due—I really didn’t foresee the Minions stealing the Mona Lisa and bringing it aboard a Jules Verne–trend submarine. On reflection, that was most likely essentially the most tutorial part of the current: learning {{that a}} Frenchman co-directed Despicable Me.
One disadvantage with this French fever dream is that loads of it was prerecorded. Every jiffy, the telecast would scale back to slick cinematography of a masked, hooded explicit individual—that’s what the NBC broadcasters saved calling her, “the Explicit individual”—sneaking the Olympic torch spherical. She went to the Louvre, the place the work bought right here to life. She went to a movie screening, the place a Lumière-brothers film … bought right here to life. These segments hit with all the drive of a cruise-ship industrial, whereas distracting from the novelty of getting a ceremony on water throughout the first place.
The dwell elements of the current weren’t much more vibrant. A bridge was reworked proper right into a runway on which type fashions and drag queens strutted with the gusto and precision of a pressured march. Platforms over the river itself featured extreme-sports performers doing suggestions that the TV cameras appeared suspiciously afraid of exhibiting in close-up. Lady Gaga positioned on a feather-laden cabaret effectivity that was utterly good, save for the reality that “utterly good” shouldn’t be anyplace near the title Lady Gaga. (As a result of it appears, that effectivity was prerecorded too.)
One in all many solely showstopping moments made clear that the weird vibes of the ceremony might largely be blamed on the ingredient work. At one degree, the digicam scale back to a woman dressed as Marie Antoinette and holding her private babbling, chopped-off head. The heavy-metal band Gojira broke into riffage, and flames fired. This was righteous. Nevertheless then, not so much occurred. Viewers had been left to develop bored with static, huge pictures of the effectivity. Finally, a fake boat wheeled into view, wanting pretty a bit like a prop from a high-school play.
The best bits occurred firmly on land. The pop star Aya Nakamura danced with the French Republican Guard in a flashy meeting of outdated and new cultural regimes. As quickly because the photo voltaic set, “the Explicit individual” emerged in precise life to expertise a cool-looking mechanical horse down the Seine. (It needs to be acknowledged that this journey was interminable.) The Olympic cauldron was cool too: It resembled a hot-air balloon, and it rose into the air when lit. To finish points off, Celine Dion made her seemingly unlikely return to singing, heaving with emotion from a deck of the Eiffel.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that rigorously composed, largely regular pictures had been the highlights of a gift that tried to reinvent the Olympic ceremony in fluid directions. My favorite second was when the pianist Alexandre Kantorow carried out Maurice Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau from a bridge as rain puddled on his instrument. He appeared sad and soaked however moreover unbothered, misplaced in music. He made me keep in mind the phrase I’d been trying to contemplate, for a kind of ineffable French feelings: malaise.
