'Tokyo Side A': Making sense of the 'pandemic Olympics'

After the scandals, the stadium controversy, the protests, the postponement, the corruption allegations, the colossal cost, the health fears, the heat and the hubris: what, really, was it all for?

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics will go down in history as both one of the strangest and the most anticlimactic Games in living memory. It was a ¥1.45 trillion ($11.3 billion) pageant that the general public couldn’t attend, the greatest success of which — beyond the various records set and barriers broken — was that nothing really awful happened.

The task of making sense of it all has fallen to Naomi Kawase, whose official, two-part documentary opens in Japanese cinemas this month. “Official Film of the Olympic Games Tokyo Side A” (what a title!) focuses on the experiences of the athletes and their entourages; “Side B,” due for release in a few weeks’ time, promises to reveal what was happening behind the scenes.

It’s the kind of project that inevitably invites skepticism. Never mind the impossibility of doing justice to such a sprawling competition (33 sports, 339 events) held under uniquely trying circumstances. Any film bearing the imprimatur of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is open to charges of being little but sophisticated propaganda.

Kawase’s recent media appearances have done little to dispel such concerns. She speaks with the passion of a true believer, convinced not only of the righteousness of the Olympics but also of her part in burnishing their legacy.

This is a film, she imagines, that people will still be watching “50 years from now, 100 years from now.” Yet only a few of the many official documentaries produced over the years have endured in that way. One of them was “Tokyo Olympiad” (1965), Kon Ichikawa’s masterful portrait of the 1964 Games. Another was Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia” (1938). Careful what you wish for.

To her credit, Kawase seems to have made the film she wanted to make. “Side A” features many of the director’s visual trademarks — grainy Super-8 footage; lyrical shots of clouds, cherry blossoms and sunlight-dappled leaves — and picks up on themes explored in her other work, notably in its emphasis on women, and especially mothers.

Two of the key characters in the documentary are athletes who are competing in the Games after recently giving birth: Canadian basketball player Kim Gaucher and American long-distance runner Aliphine Tuliamuk. They strike a poignant contrast in the film with former Japan basketballer Yuka Osaki, who had also planned to take part, but ends up watching from the sidelines with her newborn child.

Across multiple events, “Side A” emphasizes the emotional dynamics at play rather than individual feats of prowess or the final scorecard. The progress of Japan’s softball team to an Olympic gold is depicted in an impressionistic flurry of reaction shots by team and staff with little concern for the specifics of each match. The surfing competition is reduced to two men’s existential battle with the waves.

It’s an interesting approach, but it means that the film never evokes the sense of wonder conjured by “Tokyo Olympiad,” which was more inclined to marvel at the remarkable things that bodies can do. The closest it comes, ironically, is with images of the cloud of illuminated drones that hovered over the National Stadium during the opening ceremony. Take that, humanity.

Members of the public are seen watching this spectacle from the surrounding streets or on TVs and phones, which was how anyone who wasn’t taking part had to experience the Games. Whereas Ichikawa found constant delight in candid shots of spectators, Kawase is repeatedly cutting away to rows of vacant seats.

At the same time, the film doesn’t really capture the sheer strangeness of life inside the “bubble” that athletes were forced to inhabit during the first two years of the pandemic or the camaraderie that this could foster. It also has little to say about mental health, overlooking one of the most valuable conversations to emerge from the Tokyo Games.

Culled from a reported 5,000 hours of footage, “Side A” isn’t the greatest hits package that some viewers will expect. Many of the standout moments of Tokyo 2020 are consigned to a closing montage or are entirely absent.

Kawase does, however, give generous coverage to women’s basketball, the sport that she played competitively as a teenager herself. The other big winner is judo, which the film returns to repeatedly with a faint but discernible whiff of nationalism. Various talking heads discuss Akio Kuminaga’s shock defeat to Anton Geesnik at the 1964 Tokyo Games — never mind that this was over half a century ago and Japan has dominated the sport at the Olympics ever since.

The remainder of “Side A” can often feel more like a highlight reel of human-interest stories. We get segments on Syrian refugees Mohamad and Alaa Maso; the outspoken American hammer-thrower Gwen Berry; and Okinawan karateka Ryo Kiyuna, among others. Most of these are far too brief, but it’s hard to forget the agonizing journey of Saeid Mollaei, a former Iranian judoka turned political refugee, who ended up representing Mongolia in Tokyo.

There are also glimpses of soon-to-be-ex Tokyo Olympics president Yoshiro Mori, the noisy demonstrations during the run-up to the Games and the medical staff who spent the summer trying to avert a public health crisis. Presumably these topics will be addressed in more detail in “Side B,” which was still being edited at the time of writing, but it’s hard to imagine how Kawase will reconcile the many conflicting narratives.

So what did it all mean? As Tuliamuk’s partner, Tim Gannon, observes while taking care of the couple’s infant daughter: “A theme of this Olympics is that athletes are human.” “Side A” embraces this idea, returning multiple times to the message that there’s more to life than winning medals.

The film ends with IOC founder Pierre de Coubertin’s oft-repeated quote that it’s not the winning but the taking part that counts. Yet by gently knocking athletes off their pedestal, Kawase begs the question of whether the pedestal itself, with its toxic politics and ruinous price tag, is really worth the effort. While this may not be what she had in mind, her Olympic paean makes a convincing argument for hitting the reset button.