A memorable ceremony to open the Olympics found Paris plumbing its haunted past to acknowledge the world’s ever-present dangers.

He was a faceless hooded ghost in rags of regiments past, leaping across the Paris rooftops, that parkour-torchbearer. His figure was confounding. The light he carried, was it the gleam of peace or the blaze of destruction? The 2024 Paris Games promise to be one of the most testing urban events in Olympic history, a security nightmare foretold by arson attacks on rail lines around France, and its organizers were not coating it in the usual sugary pageantry. The extraordinarily confrontational Opening Ceremonies, with torch borne by this dark knight, instead asked a direct question: Will the Olympic truce hold?

The term “frank” is of course French. It comes from the Old French word “franc,” and the medieval Latin “francus,” meaning “freely, uninhibitedly outspoken.” That’s what this presentation aimed to be with its challenging imagery — blood and fire were everywhere. Usually, the Opening Ceremonies are candied and cloying, with hackneyed sequences of stuffed-animal mascots dancing with children, and the ever-obligatory chrysalis and butterflies. Sometimes these things go entertainingly or queasily wrong. Doves were grilled alive in the cauldron of the Olympic flame in Seoul in 1988. A giant baby formation in London in 2012 looked more like a swollen monster in a sand dune, and most notoriously, in Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Games, thousands of pigeons were released only to be startled by cannon fire.

This was purposefully disturbing. There were no pixies prattling songs about peace in Paris. The Conciergerie, prison to Marie Antoinette, spouted ribbons of blood and red smoke from its windows, while a metal band clanged like iron doors slamming. The subjects of great paintings burst out of the frames to peer like inmates from windows of museums. An armored horsewoman, one part Joan of Arc and one part robot, clattered down the Seine as if charging to battle, bearing — the flag of peace?

Advertisement

John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Imagine” played on a piano in flames. The pages of great works were torn from books and thrown into the wind. Human puppets swayed over a Pont like wraiths of those who had been staked there.

Dashing through it all was the torchbearer, his identity unknown. He was meant to be an amalgam of French characters and totems: the Man in the Iron Mask from Dumas, the Phantom of the Opera, Ezio from Assassin’s Creed, the wolfishly named thief and master of disguise Arsène Lupin, and Belphegor, or as Victor Hugo described him, Hell’s Ambassador. All of them fugitives from autocratic imprisonment or isolation in deep chambers, ostracized as monsters in belfries and underground cisterns.

France’s literature, music and philosophy are drenched in this stuff — idealists crushed at the barricades, bayed to death by Javert fanatics or head-seeking throngs, driven to dungeons from which they seek to break out into open air. This culture does not lend itself to cloying clichés. There is no escaping the buried truth of it — especially during this Olympics, an exercise taking place right on the........

© Washington Post