Oscillating between fist-eating dullness and unadulterated camp chaos, it’s hard to know what to say about the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony. Euro pop? Robo-horse? Naked blue man under cloche? So, so many boats? Watching brought up myriad complex emotions, none of them coherent – which, counterintuitively, put me in perfect step with this bonkers, boring show. What is there to compare an Olympic opening ceremony to? When else does a country cut together a four-hour long rendition of its own greatest hits, composed primarily of live acts that inevitably look terrible on television? Once every four years, that’s when! I watched so you didn’t have to! The first ceremony ever held outside a stadium, threading instead through the city via its legendary river Seine, Paris mixed up the usual format – fun performances first, interminable flag-trooping later – by interspersing the boring-but-necessary procession of athletes with its cabaret of national clichés.
That approach was a mixed bag – on the one hand, it was nice to have the seemingly endless flotilla of national boats carrying athletes interrupted every now and then. On the other, it drew out the boat thing for what felt like several years; even the pleasure of saying “ha!” about geographically unlikely pairings, thrown together in French alphabetical order, had worn off by the time we got to Central African Republic and Canada, let alone Portugal and Qatar. As such, there was a lot of pressure on the cut-away performances to keep us entertained.
We started strong with Lady Gaga, who delivered a delightful rendition of “Mon Truc en Plumes”by Zizi Jeanmaire, dressed in black and flanked by dancers wafting pink feather pom poms. Meanwhile, the Olympic torch was carried through the city by a mysterious hooded figure, who took helpful detours through iconic buildings and indulged in a spot of parkour on the city’s picturesque roofs; cutting between sunny pre-filmed and gloomy live footage only underscored the (largely outdoors) ceremony’s miserable weather, where rain was sometimes heavy enough to be audible on the TV: literally raining on Paris’s parade. But – to chuck another cliché in the mix – the show had to go on.
Unfazed by the weather (let alone today’s travel chaos), things valiantly got weirder and weirder. Metal band Gojira were accompanied by headless Marie Antoinette and flame throwers; three eccentrically dressed students in a library hooked up for an inexplicable ménage a trois ; there was a whole skit with Minions and the Mona Lisa ; people in Louis XIV get-up did BMX tricks. Sure, some less strange stuff happened – a performance by Aya Nakamura, the most listened-to female French language singer on Spotify, was a triumph – but by this point the madness was all that was keeping me going.
Luckily, musician Phillipe Katerine was hiding under a cloche, painted blue and singing about being naked, so I didn’t have to go without for long. The Euro-pop medley helped, too, thanks for asking. Despite a few forays into earnestness – someone sang “Imagine”next to a burning piano; 10 statues of influential French women rose out of the water like zombies – the ceremony managed to pinball between insanity and deathly dullness with very little in-between.
It was as if a different person – no, a different species – had conceived of each individual part, and they’d met to discuss it 20 minutes before kick-off; I’m not complaining, just processing. If we must do these ceremonies, you could do much worse than Paris’s model – but, must we? In its fourth hour, and as the spectacle gave way to speeches, my poor brain could finally stop whirring like an overheating processor. Not even Céline Dion singing in the Eiffel Tower, as she did for the grand finale, could rouse me; there was no sense to be made, no dots to join, I’ve used up my attention span for the next four years.
Paris, je t’aime; see you in Los Angeles in 2028..
