Olympic opening ceremony through the streets and sights of Paris was a French feast

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Leave it to the French to stage a revolution where we didn’t even know we needed one.

On Friday evening, organizers of the Paris Games blew the doors off the traditional stadium-based opening ceremony, taking the show to the streets – and the creepy tunnels, and the river, and the rain-slicked rooftops – of the City of Lights, with a four-hour celebration of high and low French culture that was thrilling, heartbreaking and sometimes so full of eye candy it became too fabulous for words.

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Billed as the most elaborate live TV event ever produced, the show played like a 12-course French feast, with jazzy appetizers, feminist amuse-bouches, hefty main courses, acerbic palate cleansers, frisky sweets and a show-stopping Celine Dion.

And if it was a tad overstuffed and sometimes dragged in places, it would be churlish to fault the organizers and their clear intent of purpose.

Also, did we mention Celine Dion?

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This opening ceremony was always going to feel like a global sigh of relief, a joyous exhale after the empty seats of Tokyo in 2021 and the tight pandemic controls of Beijing in 2022. But Friday’s festivities were an exuberant carnival, a mad feat of the French imagination that transformed a six-kilometre stretch of the River Seine and some of Paris’s most iconic buildings into a stage on which all the world could unite.

It began in the fading daylight – 7:30 p.m., Paris time – with a blast of jazzy Technicolor and a footrace through the streets of Paris, as the French soccer star Zinedine Zidane got stuck in the city’s Metro system with the Olympic torch and handed it off to a trio of kids, who then gave it up to a mysterious hooded figure in a fencing mask. Over the ensuing four hours, that figure traipsed and parkoured across the city’s landscape, threading himself through a series of scenes – or, in the parlance of the organizers, “tableaux” – that played like reveries.

The scenes celebrated the French values of equality, fraternity and liberty, as well as sisterhood, sportsmanship, diversity and solidarity, while also acknowledging the undercurrents of a world that sometimes seems to be tearing itself apart.

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The Austerlitz Bridge erupted with plumes of blue, white, and red smoke. Underneath, a veil of water formed an official starting point through which the Parade of Nations passed, 85 boats carrying 205 delegations. (The Canadian delegation shared a boat with the Central African Republic, Chile and China, which will no doubt prompt a parliamentary hearing.)

Eighty artists in ravishing pink from the Moulin Rouge performed an energetic but sometimes slipshod cancan. Workers hung off the scaffolding of the Notre Dame, which is in the midst of being rebuilt after its devastating fire in 2019, in a choreographed – and sometimes scary – ballet. Dozens of street dancers in thrifted clothes splashed playfully in a trench of shallow water on the banks of the Seine. Minutes later, the skies opened and the rains began to pound for the next hour or so, drenching participants without evidently dampening their spirits.

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A snippet of Les Misérable’s Do You Hear the People Sing opened a segment titled Liberté, leading to a shocked-looking Marie Antoinette figure holding her head in her hands while the French heavy metal band Gojira unloaded their special brand of rage on the assembled.

A ménage à trois, as much a tribute to the French New Wave as to French love itself, blossomed in the reading room of the National Library and then found its way into a Paris apartment – before the door was shut mischievously in viewers’ faces.

One moving section paid tribute to the underacknowledged contributions of women to French culture, anchored by a stirring rendition of La Marseillaise by the French mezzo-soprano Axelle Saint-Cirel, who was perched atop the Grand-Palais overlooking the Seine, backed by a choir of 34 women on the Pont-Alexandre.

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In cutting between the Parade of Nations and other scenes, the show smartly solved the knotty issue of how to sustain interest in a part of the ceremony – the parade – that lasts too long and has little to hold viewers’ attention.

After the parade, a raucous, rain-soaked dance party broke out on a red carpet that had been featuring French fashions, with dozens of high-energy (and sometimes cross-dressing) performers krumping, voguing, breaking, and waacking to their heart’s content. A few hundred metres away, another bacchanal erupted on a barge in the Seine featuring a flashing checkerboard disco dance floor that seemed as if it were powered by the performers’ raw energy.

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For all that, it was sometimes the simplest moments that made for the most affecting television: Atop a drifting raft, a piano apparently on fire underpinned a delicate rendition of John Lennon’s Imagine. The 100-year-old French track cycling champion Charles Coste, in a wheelchair, grasped the Olympic torch as the penultimate torchbearer. A female warrior on a white horse, which appeared at first as if it bore massive wings of lights, trotted slowly across the Iena Bridge toward the Trocadéro, trailed by volunteers carrying the flags of all 205 national delegations.

And then Ms. Dion, performing for the first time since 2020, appearing on the balcony of the Eiffel Tower to deliver a wrenching rendition of Hymne à l’amour. Even the rain lashing the night sky in front of her – as if the gods themselves could not contain their emotions – seemed to fit.

Still, it might have been nice if Canadian viewers had been able to watch more of the show without interruption.

During a press event in late May, Barbara Williams, the head of CBC’s English-language services, asked for people to recognize the value of public broadcasting, which she suggested was under threat in Canada.

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The Olympics and Paralympics will bring CBC/Radio-Canada its largest audiences in years, but CBC’s broadcast of the opening ceremony too often reinforced the network’s need to bend to commercial imperatives. The CBC broadcast split its screen for the first time a mere 12 minutes into the ceremony, showing a 30-second Air Canada spot, and did so again frequently over the rest of the broadcast, often at moments that, over on the U.S. broadcaster NBC, made for compelling television.

NBC, meanwhile, carried the first hour of its broadcast without formal ad breaks, albeit with a rotating cast of sponsor logos in the corner of the screen.

CBC’s breaks to full commercials – no split screen, even – sometimes came at the most enchanting moments, including a four-minute tribute to the art of filmmaking and French science fiction films, with winks at the Lumière brothers’ groundbreaking short The Arrival of a Train, Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, Planet of the Apes, and The Little Prince. Right around the time, as seen on NBC, a few dozen scampish cartoon Minions were chucking javelins around the inside of a submarine (not the wisest of moves, but then, that’s the minions!), CBC was coming out of commercial and cutting to Adrienne Arsenault and Scott Russell, chatting inside the studio to little purpose.

About 100 minutes into the ceremony, NBC carried the moment that a Polish breaker who is also an opera singer performed a nifty breakdance while crooning a gorgeous hymn by the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. CBC was showing ads for VistaPrint, Winners, Montana’s restaurant, and others.