Singing, spectacle and subplots on the Seine in the rain

The opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games – the first ever to be organised outside a stadium – has unfurled on the Seine River against a spectacular backdrop of the capital’s most celebrated monuments. Here are some takeaways:

It rained … a lot

“Jeux pluvieux, jeux heureux,” suggested the TV commentators, in mild desperation: a rainy Games is a happy Games. Four hours before the start, Météo France issued a yellow alert for the Paris region, warning of “continual, at times intense rainfall, with risk of flooding”.

And rain it did, on a sporting armada of 8,000 of the world’s top athletes sailing down 6km of the Seine on 90 boats – as dancers, singers, tightrope walkers, acrobats, breakers and drag queens performed on water, rooftops, bridges and artificial islands for 300,000 spectators.

Last month it rained so much that the Seine was running four or five times faster than its summer norm, prompting concern from the director of ceremonies, Thierry Reboul, that “if the river’s flowing too quickly, the boats will outrun” the show.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen. And though it rained – an awful lot – on France’s parade, it honestly didn’t seem to dampen anyone’s enthusiasm.

Lady Gaga did a good Zizi Jeanmaire

Surrounded by a posse of black-clad male and female dancers clutching pink feather fans, Lady Gaga gave a spirited rendition, in pretty passable French, of Mon truc en plumes by the legendary dancer, actor and singer Zizi Jeanmaire.

Known in the 1950s as the owner of “the most beautiful legs in Paris”, Jeanmaire was the undisputed star of the Ballets de Paris, with Carmen her most celebrated role.

Jeanmaire, who died in 2020, also starred in Cole Porter’s Anything Goes alongside Bing Crosby and was namechecked in Peter Sarstedt’s Where Do You Go to My Lovely (“You talk like Marlene Dietrich, and you dance like Zizi Jeanmaire”).

Lady Gaga – one of several more- or-less Francophone, but non-French, stars, including Canada’s Céline Dion, to appear in the ceremony – did her justice.

The musical styles were … as varied as the boats

We had mezzo-soprano Marina Viotti, singing L’amour est un Oiseau Rebelle from Bizet’s Carmen, Ravel, Satie and Debussy. We also had heavy metal (Gojira) and Aya Nakamura, the world’s most-streamed French-speaking artist, performing with, er, the Republican Guard.

Accompanying the boats as they sailed serenely in pouring rain from Austerlitz to the Eiffel Tower for just over three and a half hours were classics from hordes of famous-in-France legends: Claude François, Rita Mitsouko, Véronique Sanson, Michel Berger, Jean-Michel Jarre, Sheila, Daniel Balavoine, France Gall and, inevitably, Johnny Hallyday.

We had also La Marseillaise – albeit in a new, apparently “slightly less martial” version – beautifully belted out by the mezzo-soprano Axelle Saint-Cirel while clinging to the roof of the Grand Palais dressed in the French tricolore. And, right at the end, Dion’s remarkable, goose-bump-moment rendition of Edith Piaf’s Hymne à l’Amour.

Logically but rather charmingly, the boats were adapted to the size of the team. Bhutan, with barely half a dozen athletes, were in a little varnished wooden cruiser. The likes of France, Germany and the US were in vulgar bateaux-mouches.

The subplot was … complicated

It began with the French-Moroccan comedian Jamel Debbouze rocking up with the Olympic torch at an empty stadium for a ceremony that clearly wasn’t happening there, and continued with football legend Zinedine Zidane getting stuck in the Métro.

Then three kids took the flame through the catacombs, from where a mysterious masked figure – tentatively identified as a character from Assassin’s Creed Unity, much of which is set in Revolutionary Paris – travelled across the rooftops and through the monuments of the capital.

We saw the Monnaie de Paris (France’s mint), the Opéra, the Louvre, the Grand Palais, the Conciergerie … and, towards the end, a mad night-time gallop on a ghostly silver horse up the Seine, past floodlit buildings and accompanied by haunting images of Olympics past.

Plenty of history – with women at the centre

Among the 12 tableaux the teams’ boats sailed past were scenes representing some of the key moment’s of France’s history, from the 1789 Revolution to the reconstruction of Notre Dame. And there was a segment, Sorority, devoted to women.

The aim, the organisers said, was to paint a story “more plural, more diverse, richer and more close to reality” than the patriarchal official version. Paris has about 260 statues of men, and no more than 40 golden statues of women.

So we saw Olympe de Gouges, a revolutionary women’s rights activist, Louise Michel, heroine of the Commune of 1871, and Simone Veil, the Holocaust survivor who became health minister and, in 1975, legalised abortion in France.

This was, said the historian Guillaume Mazeau, “a deliberate choice that recycles, and expands, the accepted history of ‘great figures’ and brings in very different commitments, very different journeys, in the name of France’s collective story”.