MAN ON WIRE (PG)

Director:
James Marsh

Plot Summary:
On August 7th 1974, a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit stepped out on a wire illegally rigged between New York's twin towers, then the world’s tallest buildings. After nearly an hour dancing on the wire, he was arrested, taken for psychological evaluation, and brought to jail before he was finally released. Following six and a half years of dreaming of the towers, Petit spent eight months in New York City planning the execution of the coup. Aided by a team of friends and accomplices, Petit was faced with numerous extraordinary challenges: he had to find a way to bypass the WTC’s security; smuggle the heavy steel cable and rigging equipment into the towers; pass the wire between the two rooftops; anchor the wire and tension it to withstand the winds and the swaying of the buildings. The rigging was done by night in complete secrecy. At 7:15 AM, Philippe took his first step on the high wire 1,350 feet above the sidewalks of Manhattan… James Marsh’s documentary brings Petit’s extraordinary adventure to life through the testimony of Philippe himself, and some of the co-conspirators who helped him create the unique and magnificent spectacle that became known as “the artistic crime of the century.”

Genre:
Documentary

Duration:
94 Minutes

Origin:
U.S.A. / U.K.

Language:
English

Reviews:

Variety
One of the most wildly entertaining docs of recent years.

Chicago Tribune
The film itself is perfectly poised between artistry and audacity. It's beautiful.

Los Angeles Times
This is a police procedural, if you will, about what's been called the artistic crime of the century.

Washington Post
Thanks to Marsh's sensitive storytelling, Man on Wire manages to put Petit's performance into another, more ineffable realm: What began as a caper turned into poetry, and poetry became a prayer.

Wall Street Journal (Highlights)
Great documentaries, and this is one, require not only great subjects but rich supporting evidence. "Man on Wire" fills the bill with stirring footage of the World Trade Center under construction, intercut with sequences of Philippe assisted by his friends as he practices for the Twin Towers wire walk in a sun-dappled French meadow marked by a sign that says, in English, "World Trade Center Association." A self-dramatizer par excellence, Philippe Petit had been documenting his own exploits, ever since his teenage years in France, in home movies, video and film. Some of the most evocative clips show him dressed in a mime's costume and a top hat, spinning around the streets of Paris on a unicycle.

Those images look as if they'd been lifted from "Children of Paradise," Marcel Carné's cinema epic set in the Paris of Balzac, and not by accident. They express Petit's sense of himself -- his entirely accurate sense of himself -- as an entertainer in the classic French tradition. (In the very first shot of Carné's film, a tightrope walker -- un funambule -- performs at a street fair; much of the action takes place in the Théâtre des Funambules, and there's a startling resemblance between one of the film's stars, the late Jean-Louis Barrault, and the radiantly young Philippe Petit.)

"Man on Wire" is, among so many things, a tale of obsession -- "It was," Annie Allix says, "as if the towers had been built for him" -- and a love story. (Or, one might argue, a self-love story. Or a ménage à trois involving Annie, Philippe and Philippe's wire.) Beautifully wide-eyed and passionate when she was young, Annie brings the same wide eyes, and a contagious passion, to her account of her life with Philippe in France -- "When he introduced me to his wire he never thought to ask if I had my own destiny to follow" -- and of his triumph at the Twin Towers. She also brings an awareness of their love's limit, since he betrayed her, only days after that triumph, by making love to a casual American admirer. "I saw Philippe discover what it is to be famous," Annie says with poignant regret, and the movie declines, again wisely, to belabor what followed.

James Marsh's documentary raises the bar for the genre to skyscraper height. It's an inspired piece of work flawed only by the stretching and distorting of home movies to fill a wide screen, and by a short, mawkish coda. Michael Nyman's original score is exquisite; so is the use of Ralph Vaughan Williams's "The Lark Ascending" and an Erik Satie "Gymnopédie" to accompany Philippe's aerial ballets, which are studies in ecstatic relaxation. On the wire between the towers he was so relaxed that he felt free to look down, and he claims he could hear the crowd below. There's no reason to disbelieve him.

Trailer: