Let the Games begin: the Olympics Opening Ceremony in Paris

The Olympics opening ceremony in Paris was a joyful, waterborne affair on Friday night. Using the river Seine as its stadium, a flotilla of bateaux-mouches showcased a grand range of what French culture has to offer. Tricolore fireworks glittered over a pyrotechnically brilliant array of performances. Pink costumes and posters of landmarks indulged an enjoyably kitsch Francophilia and leant into a ‘vie en rose’ vision of Paris. The skies did rain on their parade, however, and the procession’s befitting glory was slightly short-circuited by constant downpour.

However you spin it, the ceremony was somewhat insane. In interviews afterwards, members of the French public seemed to agree that ‘it might have looked a bit strange’ to the rest of the world. From the dismembered parts of a creaking, overgrown Marie Antoinette to a blue Dionysian figure amongst drag queens, the whole show had the wild glee of… well, pop culture. It clashed, it clanged, it clomped down the Seine. Past and present were on the boil simultaneously: urban disco dance was juxtaposed with historic French feminist icons rising up from the Seine.

This ceremony heralded something new – an apt sentiment for the first Games to achieve gender parity. A hundred years since Paris last harboured the Olympics, there is something different in the air, and it’s mixed with a current of rebellion. Amongst other allusions to the French Revolution, the 2024 Olympic mascot is a cartoonised Phrygian cap (named Phryge: so subtle, so chic).

Celine Dion’s performance from the Eiffel Tower

The greatest triumph was when Celine Dion appeared, bediamonded and glorious, to belt out Édith Piaf’s ‘L’Hymne à l’Amour’. Dion hadn’t performed live since 2022, when diagnosed with stiff person syndrome, a rare neurological disorder. Her set was killer – even if a small part of me wishes she sang ‘My Heart Will Go On’ while on one of those boats on the Seine.

Lady Gaga’s moment, on the other hand, fell a bit flat. She knows, as ever, how to make an entrance: pastel pink feather hearts were fluttered to the side to reveal Gaga in cabaret glamour. In her quintessential way, she would sometimes slightly randomly switch to tender crooning at a piano. And yet, it just didn’t televise well, probably because it was prerecorded and lacked a certain conviction (cabaret that didn’t manage to reach burlesque). When we got a long shot of her troupe from the side, it looked like a garish group dancing to no-one except the drab Seine. There was something almost morbid in the disjunct between the glowering skies and the persevering bright pinks of the dancers.

A cabaret needs an audience: it relishes in performativity. But separated from the spectators by the Seine, it was hard to capture the atmosphere or brilliance of Gaga’s performance. The purpose of the whole opening ceremony is to create a fervour surrounding the Games – which is hard without an audience directly in front of the acts. But at the same time, the Olympics have to be a little bit about belief. I choose to believe that Lady Gaga’s performance was in fact camp.

Lady Gaga’s cabaret-style dance. Maja Hitij/Getty Images

Aya Nakamura’s gilded performance of her major hits was heartening, especially after initial backlash from the far-right and linguistic purists, who gripe about her blending of French and slang. The weather really was a shame here as her performance would have looked fabulous in sunlight.

However, what followed became increasingly disjointed. The performance of ‘Imagine’ by Juliette Armanet, though well-sang, felt a bit random. One can’t criticise a call for peace, but it’s not clear setting a piano on fire and floating it down the Seine is the best medium for that. It was also a stray non-French song marooned in an otherwise very French ceremony – maybe they were gunning for a more universal angle. Later, a futuristic mechanised horse galloping down the river is Fun Galore, but what oh what does it mean?

An odd effect of all this malarkey is that, after a big masked parkour over the rooftops and a hooded horsewoman, the actual athletes looked a bit anticlimactic. Our sportspeople are meant to be demi-gods, and yet here they seemed quite human, even deflated.

There is something a bit tiring and forced about four-hour long celebrations; a hyper-joviality is expected of us. Football matches trade on a crucial build-up before release of tension (as, indeed, do most actual Olympic events). There needs to be an elasticity of emotional pressure. Even coronations and royal weddings are underscored by gravitas, not just perma-parties. But perhaps that is the nature of the beast with Olympic openings. Like the rain, it was not the fault of the Olympics delegation – merely a feature of the cosmos. But the technical, technicolour innovation of the Seine-stadium was still clever. The displays all had a joyful, properly Carnivalesque idea of a party. And I do like that ‘satanic’ started trending on Twitter after people decided a sprawled Dionysian figure was a sort of gay smurf Antichrist. It’s 19 days after an election which the far-right nearly trounced: at least they are now irked by the Olympics. Paris has reassured us that camp lives on in France!