Yes, it rained, whatever. I loved it. I thought it was the most audacious, inventive, fearless, magnificently creative display, often visually jaw-dropping despite the wet. Staging the ceremony in the centre of living, breathing Paris was incredibly bold, but I think it paid off. Also, putting diversity and inclusivity front and centre flicked the most massive Vs at the far right, which never makes me feel sad either. So bravo to that, for starters.
We kicked off in a tube station with Zinedine Zidane, who is French of Algerian descent (Zizou dans le métro?), detoured via drag queens briefly pausing their bacchanalian party to create a still tableau of what looked very like The Last Supper, and ended with Black athletes Marie-José Pérec and Teddy Riner lighting the Olympic cauldron - MY GOD, THE CAULDRON. Other highlights:
In the section called Ça Ira, which the BBC commentator sweetly translated as ‘all will be well’ - it was in fact a reference to a famous revolutionary chant about hanging aristocrats from lampposts - the Conciergerie had blood-red windows and a freshly guillotined Marie Antoinette holding her own severed head in her hands while she sang.
This was Marina Viotti, whose lament played against Gojira’s heavy metal version of the sans-culottes song Ça Ira (sans-culottes = without breeches, i.e. the proletariat in long workers’ trousers rather than perfumed aristos showing off their calves in silk and ribbons).
In the end the whole building ran with blood. The red-clad, headless aristocrats framed in all the windows also reminded me a bit of Jean Paul Goude’s 1990 ad for Chanel’s Egoïste. (When Marie Antoinette was incarcerated in the Conciergerie, the mob put the bloodied head of her dearest friend, the Princesse de Lamballe, on a spike, and paraded it outside her window, causing her to faint).