Review: Man On Wire (4/5)

Man on Wire
(James Marsh):
Philippe Petit, Jean-Louis Blondeau, Annie Allix, David Foreman.
Running time: 94 minutes

Among all the dumbfounding images to be found in James Marsh’s dizzying documentary Man on Wire, the kind of images that cause your legs to make off for the bar to down a steadying stiff drink, there is one that knocked me out: it is a black and white photo taken on 7 August 1974 of Manhattan’s former World Trade Center. The photo is framed by the vertical stripes of the Twin Towers and at the top left, captured in silhouette, is a jetliner that, by a trick of perspective, seems a split second from collision. Move your gaze to the centre of that photograph, and you’ll see an ant-like figure walking on what looks like fine thread. It could be a scratch on the negative. This is Philippe Petit, then a fearless unknown, walking a tightrope between the two towers, a quarter of a mile above the ground. It is a haunting yet prescient photo: it captures not just the angelic majesty of Petit’s daredevilry, but the past too colliding with the present.
Man on Wire, a documentary about this “the artistic crime of the century”, has nothing to do with 9/11. Not a whisper. Yet it has everything to do with it. And Petit’s achievement is today tinctured with the toxins of recent memory. (On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, the New Yorker magazine ran a cartoon of Petit’s highwire act with the towers erased out). When the Twin Towers were built in 1970, violence was rupturing the Middle East, but America’s virtue was barely scuffed. It was the tallest skyscraper in the world of its time, and the inaugural speech said “that it will truly promote not only harmony between the states but harmony and communication between the nations of the world”. Tourists flocked to see it. Among them was Philippe Pettit, a tightrope walker who had already been arrested twice for walking the clouds of Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral and Sydney’s Harbour Bridge. (His best trick? To lie down on the wire as if having a snooze). Petit, sitting in a dentist’s waiting room, saw a sketch of the then unbuilt towers in a magazine and was hooked. The irony is he had to approach the deed with the subterfuge of a terrorist. He spent months surveying the building, assembling a team to infiltrate the towers. Fake IDs had to be made, a worker inside had to be groomed, and photos had to be taken on the roofs so Petit could figure how to set up the complex rope mechanism. He hired a helicopter, posed as a journalist to get inside and even slipped past security to have a look at the top. They took a lot of photos: one of them shows Petit blithely doing a handstand on the very edge of the tower. What kind of man is he? He is certainly an exuberant storyteller. There is a moment he refers to himself as “a poet conquering beautiful stages” and you know immediately he must be French – who else to reimagine circus as philosophy? And as for his brilliance, on that August morning he walked across eight times; did a salute while balancing on a knee, had a conversation with a seagull, and only came in when the police threatened to scoop him up with a helicopter. Marsh assembles Petit’s accomplices and today they are all bald and grey. That is except for Petit, whose sagging face is framed by bushy carrot hair. I suppose if you have stared down death from on top of the world on a steel rope, regular life doesn’t get to you. Though it must be said the event took its toll: his childhood friendship with Jean-Louis Blondeau, a key figure in the plan, fell apart, and Petit’s newfound celebrity ruined his long-term relationship Annie Allix. The tale unspools like a heist movie – the assembling of a team, the execution of a plan. But director James Marsh (he directed Gael Garcia Bernal in The King) chops back and forth with backstory, securing old footage of Petit, training in his back garden and poignant news reels of the building of the Twin Towers, its foundations looking uncannily like Ground Zero. Yet the film avoids sentimentality. Man on Wire celebrates our will to dream. Like last year’s In The Shadow of the Moon, it captures that other side of human madness with staggering images to match: how beauty comes of towering achievement, whether that be the building of Babel or the walking across it on a tightrope. Man on Wire helps reclaim the wonder of those two acts from the shadow of 2001’s terror. See it in the cinema, and try not to fall dizzy out of your seat.