I didn’t see Tokyo 2020 Olympics Side:A, the first half of Naomi Kawase’s official documentary of last year’s games. From talking to others who had seen it, I gathered it contained the athletic footage for which most official Olympic docs are known. The International Olympic Committee obliges hosts to produce these docs as a means of maintaining a visual record of the Games and, as with almost all things Olympic, the IOC itself doesn’t have to pay for it. Usually, they’re pretty boring and no one goes out of their way to see them. In fact, the most famous of them (if we don’t count Leni Reifenstahl’s, which may not have been an official documentary) was the one that Kon Ichikawa directed about the last time the Olympics were held in Tokyo in 1964, mainly because Ichikawa tried to make what many believed was an art film. Like Kawase’s movie, Ichikawa’s chronicled an event that was considered a turning point in the history of the host city. Tokyo 1964 marked Japan’s reentry into the community of nations following its defeat in World War II, and though Ichikawa was careful in carrying out his ecumenical mandate by covering athletes from all over the world, the focus was on the city where it was taking place, and how much it had modernized since its almost total destruction during the war.
Kawase’s brief is similar but different. Tokyo 2020 was also historically unique but the historical significance was thrust upon it. The games were conducted in the middle of a deadly pandemic that had already caused its postponement for one year, so Kawase rightly figured her movie would have to include how the organizers and others coped with the crisis in order to make sure the games could be pulled off. During the press conference at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan following the screening of Tokyo 2020 Olympics Side:B, the second half of the doc, which dealt mostly with the games’ behind-the-scene machinations, Kawase stressed that she wanted to show all sides of the situation, presumably meaning both the side that insisted the games go ahead at any cost and the side who thought it shouldn’t for various reasons—and not all of them related to COVID. Having just sat through the two jam-packed-with-incident hours of Side:B, I found Kawase’s assessment of her accomplishment missing a vital admission. As the official documentarian, she had access—limited to a certain extent, as she said, but access nonetheless—to people directly involved with the games who invariably supported them. On the other hand, the sides that objected to the Olympics—some on principle, others based on circumstances peculiar to these games—could only be accessible through special efforts that no one seemed to have made. Any coverage of these people and their opinions in the film were indirect and incidental: protesters outside the venues clashing with police, individual citizens complaining about the cost. In the end, Side:B couldn’t help but conclude that the games were a success because almost all of the narrative drama was invested in how much effort was expended to make them happen. Those who objected simply came off as spoilsports.
No one should really expect the tone of the documentary to be otherwise, since it was an “official” record, but Kawase’s self-identified even-handedness felt like a dodge. The film was candid about the internal and existential problems that plagued the effort before and during the games, including the summer heat worries, the loss of volunteers after the postponement due to anxiety over infections, the decision to not allow general spectators into the venues, the issues that led to some staff involved in the opening and closing ceremonies quitting or apologizing for past statements, and the verbal gaffes that lead to Yoshiro Mori’s resignation as president of the organizing committee, but these problems were generally smoothed over through the supporters’ tireless dedication to making it all work. Mori’s sexist remarks were recreated verbatim, but qualified by comments from colleagues and other insiders who mostly commisserated with what he was going through. Had I not lived through these events on a daily news basis, I would have come away from the movie with the idea that Mori was just a guy whose heart was in the right place but was bullied by media who picked apart his old-fashioned way of thinking. And while I did note that someone complained about Dentsu, the advertising goliath, which essentially ran the whole operation for a presumably huge payday, very little was said about the ballooning costs except by protesters who were rightfully resentful they were being forced to pay for it but whose position was, according to the direction of the movie, compromised by an overly emotional attitude. In one uncomfortable scene, IOC head Thomas Bach is confronted by some elderly anti-Olympic demonstrators and he dismisses them with a sharp, clever rebuke. Elsewhere, protesters were characterized as an incoherent rabble. No attempt is made to understand why these people didn’t want the Olympics except the COVID angle, and since it was reported afterwards that the feared clusters of infections didn’t materialize, those objections seemed groundless.
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