‘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.