Back in 2012 an Irish friend volunteering at the London Olympics rang after witnessing the opening ceremony rehearsal. Watch it, he said, there’s something a bit throat-catching about it.
It certainly was that – conjuring up a gloriously playful, diverse, inventive, united Britain with a spectacular world-changing back catalogue. Elgar’s Nimrod soared over East London as Kenneth Branagh, Shakespeare’s Caliban, opened with the words: “The clouds methought would open, and show riches. Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked, I cried to dream again!” The Queen jumped out of a helicopter with James Bond, Churchill’s statue waved a cane at them and Mr Bean morphed into Chariots of Fire hero, a boy soprano sang Jerusalem and Paul McCartney sang Hey Jude. The NHS, famously, took centre stage.
It was a thoroughly bonkers, benign, wholesome, myth-making version of Britain that had many subjects in proud tears even as the country was turning sharp right into savage cuts to the NHS, the darkness of the culture wars and Brexit loathing. Right-wingers condemned it as a state-funded Labour campaign video. The incoming Tory culture secretary Jeremy Hunt pushed to reduce or cut the NHS sequence.
But they felt like golden weeks in London. In his 2018 novel Middle England, Jonathan Coe featured a range of characters watching the opening ceremony, including Doug, a snarky journalist who realises that the strange emotion he is experiencing is ... pride, “proud to be British, proud to be part of a nation which had not only achieved such great things but could now celebrate them with such confidence and irony and lack of self-importance.”
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It all came back last Friday during the Paris opening ceremony, set in a city of swooning beauty rather than a stadium, under artistic director Thomas Jolly. If it felt like a different, cooler creature. Well – it can’t be said often enough – this was Paris.
For London, director Danny Boyle’s vision was “the idea of Jerusalem – of a better world, the world of real freedom and true equality ...” For Thomas Jolly, the artistic director of the Paris ceremony, it was “to make a ceremony that repairs, reconciles and reaffirms the values of our republic: liberty, equality, fraternity.” It would only be a success if everyone felt represented in it, he said, and like it or not, he created the most inclusive event in the history of sport. The pagan feasting tableau certainly had intimations of Da Vinci’s Last Supper mural (painted in the 1490s and owned by the Italian government) but many more of the naked, drunken revelry overseen by winged cherubs in van Biljert’s Feast of the Gods, a 1635 painting kept at the Musee Magnin in Dijon. The near naked blue-painted roué awkwardly planted in a fruit platter at the centre of Jolly’s banquet might have been the giveaway – that was Bacchus, God of wine combined with Dionysus the Greek god of fertility and feasting and performing arts. If the real objection is that Jolly cast an over-abundance of drag queens in the four-hour show, maybe that could be the more honest discussion.
The vibe and humour were undeniably French and therefore not to everyone’s taste. Dionysus looked more Eurovision than Greek goddish and the repetitive parades of sneery, unitarded models were pretty true to type. The EU segment represented by dancers on a barge united by the cheesiest of Eurodisco was irritating and the masked torchbearer bounding across Paris rooftops was an interminable reprise of countless movies. The boat-borne Parade of Nations left the athletes – the heart of the ceremony – isolated in a kind of reversal of the unity theme and diminished by the competing Seine-side spectaculars.
But Seine-side memorably included a soaked Alexandre Kantorow lost in Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau at a rain-drenched piano. Axelle Saint-Cirel singing La Marseillaise on top of the Grand Palais in a gown eight meters long to resemble a gigantic French flag. Guillaume Diop, principal dancer of the Paris Opera Ballet, performing on a roof. Juliette Armanet singing Imagine beside a flaming piano on a fake island. Aya Nakamura, the French-Malian superstar whose slangy lyrics – and possibly existence – incense the far-right, dressed in acres of gold fringing singing with the poker-faced Republican Guard marching band. Marie Antoinette holding her own chatty head. Dancers in the Notre Dame scaffolding. The ghostly galloping silver horse. Serena Williams wobbling in a boat. Celine Dion in the Eiffel Tower wreathed in thousands of pearls and 500 meters of fringing singing Piaf’s Hymne A L’Amour.
British critics tried to claim an all-time win for London but there was no way to compare the two shows, any more than China could be compared to Rio. My problem with Paris was everyone else’s. Exhaustion. The lack of a ruthless editor to pull it back to two and a half hours. Maybe we expected to feast on something new but realised in the longueurs that it was just a glitzy opening ceremony made for TV after all and that even in Paris rain is dismal and the Seine has sewage. And maybe the real message from Paris was one about extraordinary courage, daring and defiance, a truly remarkable gamble by officials in the face of recent atrocities and continuing threats.
As for Thomas Jolly’s sometimes overblown vision ... perhaps a little of that ferocious blowback could have been focused on the participation of the Dutch volleyball athlete who served 13 months for the rape of a 12 year old girl.