As the sun rose on Aug. 7, 1974, Philippe Petit stepped upon a cable stretched across two hundred feet between the Twin Towers. For 45 minutes he went back and forth eight times, precariously balancing on a tightrope 110-stories and nearly 1,400 feet above the city ground. Petit's act was not mere walking. He pranced, knelt and laid down on this thin strip of medal. In a press conference afterwards a New York City police sergeant soberly described the act as more apt to dancing.
Man on Wire is the new documentary directed by James Marsh. The film was originally entered into the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary and Audience Award for best Documentary.
Petit is a French high wire artist (the French word is 'funambule') who built his reputation illegally traversing wires between the Sidney Harbour Bridge and the Norte Dame Cathedral in Paris.
As Petit recalls, as a young teenager he saw an article about plans to construct the Twin Towers, which would be the two tallest buildings in the world. From this moment on, he possessed a monomaniacal obsession with crossing between the two buildings.
The film centers on the six and half years that went into planning this elaborate stunt. We hear the retrospective accounts of the participants, who seem to remember every slight detail of the act, and with considerable amount of consistency between them.
The movie unfolds as a heist movie, in which they sneak into the World Trade Center and labor the entire night avoiding security and assembling the 200-foot cable.
However, unlike the standard heist film, there is no prize, no treasure. For Marsh as well as the participants themselves, "why?" is the wrong question for it fails to recognize the mystery that art possesses. As Jean-Louis Blondeau, one of central planners, put it, "the important thing is that we did it."
The avoidance of motivation makes the film all the more captivating, profoundly delving into existentialist issues that are ordinarily susceptible to clichés and pseudo-philosophizing.
When the film begins, the act seems to be a foolish stunt, the work of a publicity-hungry dare devil or an andreline-jucky of the most extreme kind. This impression changes as the viewer is forced to contemplate the logic of art and the meaning of living. This theme could have digressed into pretentous babble, but it did not. The film suprisingly was able to tackle questions on the human condition. Whether it provided any answers I will leave to the viewer.
For Marsh, questions such as funding or Petit's record with the law are mundane and irrelevant. The minimalism of the film is a kind of poetry, reflecting Petit's act itself.
We learn about the event through both reminiscences as well as old home-movie footage of Petit's training camp in the French countryside, and re-enactments, in which Marsh re-creates the event that Petit and his crew came to call le coup.
While the act formed the center narrative of the film, the character of Petit himself provides for much of the intrigue as we already know from the beginning that he will succeed in the end. Petit comes across as narcissistic and self-mythologizing, but also a true artist in all the madness and genius that the term implies.
One of the most revealing voices is that of Annie Allix, Petit's girlfriend at the time. She was a shy girl who became enraptured by Petit's charisma and rebellious spirit. After the event, she grew further and further apart from Petit. She speaks fondly, though not without pain, about her lover of years ago whose passion was coupled with a lack of concern for other people.
While the film conspicuously never mentions Sept. 11, one cannot watch the film without the images of that day looming in one's mind.
This deliberate decision by Marsh allows the film to be about the wonder of the act itself. The buildings are to be understood as symbols of hope and dreams of aspirations, not of destruction.
