One of the main attractions of the Paris 2024 Olympics is, of course, Paris. The City of Lights and its many world-famous landmarks will be the center of attention at this year’s Games. While the riders will compete in Versaillesbeach volleyball matches will be played in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Swimmers will, weather permitting, race in the Seine. But it’s hard to imagine that any event offers as magnificent a tribute to Paris as Friday’s Opening Ceremony, which eschewed the confines of a stadium and made the entire city its stage. The ceremony, which took place around sunset in France and will be broadcast again on “enhanced“The Form at 7:30 PM ET on NBC was occasionally strange, wildly ambitious, ultimately wonderful, and wildly French.
The torch relay was a spectacle in itself, as French football star Zinedine Zidane carried the flame through the cafes and skate parks of Paris, before passing it – in a metro tunnel – to a masked figure who would lead it. across rooftops, through a subway tunnel. zip lining and beyond, on the way to the Olympic cauldron at the Trocadéro. Meanwhile, the Parade of Nations traveled by boat along a 6-kilometer stretch of the Seine, stopping for musical performances and other themed vignettes that artistic director Thomas Jolly interspersed throughout the four-hour event in order to give the delegation a moment of each country. in the spotlight.
Every show-stopping moment – from Lady Gaga’s surprise-but-not-really appearance, during which she sang perfectly in French, surrounded by dancers with feather fans, to the unexpectedly moving sight of pianist Alexandre Kantorow playing Ravel on rain – was set in an iconic Parisian setting. International pop sensation Aya Nakamura gave an energetic performance in a gorgeous gold monochrome ensemble appropriate for the Olympics on the Pont des Arts, which connects the Institut de France to the Louvre. On the roof of the Grand-Palais, mezzo-soprano Axelle Saint-Cirel sang “La Marseillaise”. A catwalk has been converted into a catwalk, near the Eiffel Tower, for a celebration of French fashion.
See more information: Opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics in photos
And in the final minutes of the ceremony, there was Celine Dion, long rumored to be performing in Paris, singing Édith Piaf’s “Hymne à l’amour” on a stage in the middle of the same tower, singing triumphantly to the entire city and the world hear. . You didn’t have to be her biggest fan to feel your heart swell at the sight—and, more specifically, the sound—of the singer, who had been sidelined by stiff person syndrome, back in top form. With all there is to feel hopeless about in 2024, it’s hard to imagine a more elegant embodiment of resilience.
As is often the case at events steeped in tradition, the most enjoyable moments tended to be the strangest – and most idiosyncratic French – ones. Dozens of dancers dressed in hot pink doing the can-can? Fantastic. Marie Antoinette holding her recently decapitated singing head, as an introduction to a piece that would bring together opera singer Marina Viotti with French metal stalwarts Gojira? Live the revolution. An ode to love and literature that began in the library and ended with what was, by all accounts, a Threesome walk into an apartment and cheekily close the door on the camera operator? Ooh la la. It wouldn’t be Paris without this frisson.
Were there errors? More listen; a show of this scale and duration could never be perfect. The amount of time devoted to Minions weeks after the release of Despicable Me 4during a cinema segment that also featured deserving pioneers of French cinema such as Georges Méliès, seemed obscenely promotional to me. (If you’re wondering about the French connection, the film was produced by Illumination Studios Paris). The pre-Celine final hour was boring, if unavoidable, with its welcome speeches, laser lights and ceremonial boat ride. NBC’s coverage for American audiences was also, although not weak enough to be a major distraction, something of a low light; announcers and correspondents offered lots of canned sports facts and insipid interviews with the U.S. team, but little information about the performances.
But no false note could mar the spectacle that Jolly and his team put on across the city, with rain adding another major obstacle to the execution of the event. Especially after two Opening Ceremonies, Beijing 2022 and Tokyo 2020 (which was postponed until 2021), which were relatively anticlimactic and impersonal due to COVID-19 restrictions, the Paris edition felt grand and human. When it was cheesy (see: the obligatory version of “Imagine,” this time on a barge with a burning piano that clearly symbolized a world on fire), it was catchy. More than high-quality entertainment for spectators paying top dollar for stadium seats or spectators in living rooms around the world, it resonated as a show about and for Paris, making the buildings, monuments, history and, above all, the people of the city, the center of the celebration.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
