Film
Walk the line
by David Larsen
David Larsen reviews Man on Wire.
“I did something magnificent and mysterious, and I got a practical ‘why?’ The beauty of it was there was no why.”
Indeed there was not. French wire-walker Philippe Petit had convinced a group of friends it would be a grand thing to fly to New York, help him smuggle 200 kilos of steel cable to the top of the World Trade Centre and string it between the roofs of the Twin Towers, so he could walk across it. If you needed to ask “why do it?” about something like that, you weren’t going to understand the answer.
In fact, very few people did need to ask. The thrill of James Marsh’s documentary Man on Wire is that it recreates an event so ridiculous, so pointless, so perfect, that even the cop who arrested Petit the minute he stopped having 450m of empty air underneath him said it had been a privilege to witness it. (Other members of the New York Police Department were less enthused; they were the ones who asked Petit to explain why he thought breaking the law to risk his life was a good idea.)
If an event like this happened today, spectator video would be on YouTube before you could blink. In the 80s or 90s, helicopters full of journalists would have swarmed around the towers and provided posterity with newscast-quality footage, possibly knocking Petit off his wire with their down-draft in the process. But this was 1974, barely a year after construction on the towers was completed, and the only pictures we have are photographic stills.
In Marsh’s hands, they’re better than video. He lets his camera drift across them slightly, providing just enough of a sense of motion that suddenly the images feel three-dimensional and real. You’re looking at a man doing a headstand right on the edge of a half-kilometre-high building: and now he’s stepping off the edge, on to a wire so thin it’s hardly there. Purest vertigo.
Around the walk itself, Marsh deploys interviews and recreated scenes that look for all the world like original home video: Petit practising his skills in a meadow, with friends jiggling the wire to simulate the complex effects of wind and the towers’ motion; his little band driving their van through the streets of Manhattan and sneaking their gear past sleepy guards.
Almost my favourite bit of the film is the unfakeable moment when one of his friends breaks down and starts crying as he describes how Petit’s expression changed from apprehension to joy, a few steps out onto the wire. From now on, when I think of those towers, I’ll think of that.
MAN ON WIRE, directed by James Marsh.
