How the French shot themselves in the Olympic foot
Anyone who spends any time in France will hear the phrase “n’importe quoi” being disdainfully bandied about with some regularity. In many ways roughly equivalent to the English “nonsense”, it also has connotations of intellectual laziness, coupled with a sense of posturing. When somebody says or does “n’importe quoi”, they are not only engaged in something obviously incorrect or inappropriate, they are all too often doing so obstinately, driven by their own distorting ego.
Which brings me, with a thud, to Friday night’s Olympic Games Opening Ceremonies.
I must admit, not without considerable embarrassment, that I was actually looking forward to watching this. While hardly a fan of long, grandiose displays of nationalistic fervor, I convinced myself that this time would be different.
After all, as I wrote in my last blog piece, the Paris 2024 Olympic Games promised to be a refreshingly unique and progressive occasion, with the organizers explicitly transcending the usual hypocritical tropes and instead projecting a unique, genuinely unifying, environmentally-friendly message. By bringing the Games directly into the city itself, the forward-thinking organizers were tangibly demonstrating how the Olympic ideal of striving for excellence could be meaningfully applied well beyond the athletic domain.
While most cities’ post-Olympics legacy was debt and increased taxation, Paris would, remarkably, have a swimmable Seine. And instead of holding all events in distant, general-purpose sporting venues, Paris would fully integrate the Games within its iconically elegant city, thereby beautifying the competitions while elevating them out of a narrow sporting context, vastly increasing their appeal and accessibility to one and all.
It was an extraordinarily bold vision. And it actually seemed to be working. The Seine, slowly but surely, was getting cleaner. The Grand Palais, always stunningly beautiful, was transforming into something even more impressive still.
Meanwhile, the elaborate, meticulously-organized Olympic Torch Relay that criss-crossed the country for 68 days was an unqualified success, producing a wealth of moving moments across the entire country (no mean feat in the midst of a sudden, deeply polarizing and quite unnecessary legislative election), as was amply demonstrated in the beautifully-crafted documentary series, Au cœur des Jeux by Jules et Gédéon Naudet, that aired on public television just last week, emotionally priming the nation for the Games while vividly illustrating the capacity of French filmmakers to produce singularly impressive and coherent works with unimaginable speed.
And then came the Opening Ceremonies.
There were, of course, some positive moments: Axelle Saint-Cirel’s rooftop Marseillaise was wonderful, while Celine Dion’s finale was as moving and fitting as everyone had hoped. I thought that the combination of Aya Nakamura and the Orchestra of the Republican Guard was great fun (although my enjoyment was doubtless heightened by imagining the apoplexy it was giving to millions of Rassemblement National supporters), while the magnificent Alexandre Kantorow gave a truly heroic and monumentally underrated rain-soaked performance of Ravel’s Water Games (in which, incomprehensibly, his hair was much less disheveled than usual). Even Lady Gaga, I must admit, did her predictably campy job quite competently.
But those were all isolated moments provided by accomplished professional musicians. Who would have honestly expected anything different?
The elephant in the room, here—or in this case, the mechanical horse on the water—is that on balance, the entire experience was precisely the sort of vapid, bombastically incoherent nonsense that goes a considerable distance towards reinforcing everyone’s knee-jerk stereotype of the French that I was desperately hoping that these Olympics might finally put to rest.
You know what I mean here, surely: the well-worn image of the smugly self-righteous Frenchman, condescendingly informing you in broken English that the fact that you cannot immediately discover the profoundly meaningful link between the length of Gainsbourg’s nose, the setting of Zola’s Germinal and the final movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique is simply a reflection of your lamentable mental and cultural shortcomings.
A person, in other words, exactly like Thomas Jolly, the maximally pretentious “artistic director” of the opening ceremonies.
And suddenly, tragically, the magnificent opportunity to showcase what these Games were really all about was gone, sacrificed to the monumental ego of a tedious poseur.
Let’s leave aside the undeniable incoherence of a show that somehow managed to take the most tailor-made opportunity imaginable—a visual stroll through the heart of one of the most visually stunning urban environments on earth—and turn it into a veritable comedy of theatrical unintelligibility without the slightest scintilla of a narrative arc: here a headless Marie Antoinette, there a ménage à trois, over there a few Minions, followed by the Mona Lisa floating in the Seine, all “unified” by the ongoing exploits of a masked man who is eventually completely forgotten after an all-too-lengthy downstream ride on his mechanical horse.
Let’s leave aside, too, the obvious fact that individually announcing the presence of over 200 nations slowly drifting down a river on their boats is hardly the most compelling theatrical motif one could imagine—something that you’d think would have dawned on the “choreographers” at a very early stage of the process.
No, what really got my goat was that in this miasma of tedious disconnectedness, this acme of n’importe quoi, the whole point of what makes Paris 2024 special was lost. Here we were, on the Seine, during the opening ceremonies of an Olympic Games that is uniquely distinguished by incorporating those very Games within the fabric of this spectacular and transformed city, and the monumental idiot in charge of the opening ceremonies has elected, in his grandiose wisdom, to not bother highlighting any of that.
No mention of BMX and basketball at the Place de la Concorde, or Taekwondo and fencing in the meticulously refurbished Grand Palais, or beach volleyball in the Champs de Mars, or, perhaps most significant of all, the swimming part of the triathlon in the Seine itself.
In fact, a moment’s reflection will reveal that the opening ceremonies for Paris 2024 inexplicably ignored not only their uniquely defining characteristic, but, aside from a very brief video montage at the end, the Olympic Games themselves, with the world’s best athletes awkwardly marooned on drenched boats, condemned to watch Jolly’s criminally interminable act of self-indulgence.
Eventually, of course, sports managed to take center stage—how could it not, after all?—and we were briefly presented with a cascade of past and present greats, culminating with the charismatic duo of Teddy Riner and Marie-José Pérec lighting the highly imaginative and impressive Montgolfier cauldron.
But by then the damage had well and truly been done. For not only had we all been subjected to a rambling, disjointed, 4-hour vanity project that consistently refused to even remotely allude to what we were all supposed to be celebrating, but we had also, for good measure, been forced to experience Mr Jolly’s notorious “Last Supper” fashion show scene, complete with drag queens and a coy blue Dionysus, whose presence was justified by an official “explanatory tweet” informing us that, “The interpretation of the Greek God Dionysus makes us aware of the absurdity of violence between human beings.” Ah, so that was Jolly’s message of brotherly love. How profound.
Now, given the hyper-polarized times we live in, I feel compelled to make a few basic admissions that, in a sane world, I would surely not need to: I am firmly opposed to any discrimination based on sexual orientation (among many other things), and I unequivocally support the right of any two people to love each other; and, if mutually inclined, to marry. I am also, as it happens, not a practicing Christian (nor a pagan Greek).
What I am, however, steadfastly opposed to is the notion of someone effectively hijacking a deeply significant international event in order to gratuitously offend as many people as possible so as to justify his warped perception of being a “daring artistic genius” (but not too daring, presumably; it’s hardly a coincidence, I suspect, that he opted to ridicule—sorry, “interpret”—a sacred aspect of the Christian faith, rather than one of Islam or Judaism). And when such toxic actions are coupled with laughably ignorant “explanations” of Greek mythology (everyone ready for a Jolly-directed version of The Bacchae?) it makes it, somehow, just that extra little bit worse.
Despite the dedicated efforts of thousands, if not millions, of people over the last few years to create something justifiably inspirational, France has summarily, and entirely needlessly, thrown it all away: emphatically demonstrating to the world that it’s not a place to be taken seriously.
The French? Well, you know how they are—desperately trying to shock you into thinking that they’re so deep and original. C’est n’importe quoi.
Howard Burton, July 29, 2024
Howard is a filmmaker and author of six non-fiction books on various topics, details can be found HERE. His most recent book, Chessays: Travels Through the World of Chess, includes thought-provoking essays on chess as a sport, tennis, entertainment, the Olympic Games and more. He is also the Director of Pandemic Perspectives (2022), Through the Mirror of Chess: A Cultural Exploration (2023), Raphael: A Portrait (2024) and Botticelli’s Primavera (2025) which is the first film in our Renaissance Masterpieces Series.
