Thomas Jolly, the man that you are!
Nearly two hours into the endlessly entertaining 2024 Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony, I’m thinking its artistic director might be the most brilliant French mind since the mad scientists who dreamed up the Minions. It would have been enough to stage an opening procession on the Seine, E. coli be damned, in a flag-bearing cavalcade unlike any before it. But on top of it all, he gave this thing plot, direction, comedy, drama, circus, theatrics, fashion, and musical extravaganza in a celebration of all things French, right down to the most croissants-and-baguettes cliché. Literally. During the “La Vie en Rose†section, one of the huge pink cartes postales dotting the river literally said “Baguette! Croissant! Cliché!†It was an Emily in Paris fever dream.
Until it turned into an Emily in Paris bourgeois nightmare!
Jolly expressed his intent before the ceremony to “play with†but also “challenge†French cliché, and in the most vibrant, exciting celebration of French identity in the ceremony so far, they did a full musical, metal–opera–Cameron Mackintosh mash-up tribute to … the guillotine! In the “Liberté†portion of the ceremony, sandwiched between a tribute to the craftsmanship of Louis Vuitton and a pretaped perfume commercial-adjacent segment celebrating the horny highbrow smut of French literature, a row of beheaded Marie Antoinette types swathed in red with decapitated faces painted clown-white sang the French revolutionary song “Ça ira†alongside the heavy-metal band Gojira. All of this happened directly after a brief, artistically shot rendition of “Do You Hear the People Sing?,†from Les Miserables. To add to this proudly irreverent celebration of the revolution, a big boat-float rolled in carrying a soprano singing Carmen.
Tying it all together was the through-line of the ceremony’s Parkour-Fantômas torch bearer in an épée mask, running the torch from the Les Mis barricades through the horny queer threesome library. The headlessness and the heavy metal make this one of the coolest segments in a ceremony full of them. Who knew Lady Gaga hamming it up in the “Enchanté†segment wouldn’t be the highlight? The only section more hard-core than this celebration of the overthrowing of monarchy and aristocracy? Obviously the Minions stealing the Mona Lisa. Vive la France!