In August of 1974, a redheaded Frenchman with the perfectly precious
nom de cirque Philippe Petit (along with a crew of coconspirators)
sneaked into the newly erected World Trade Center, smuggled cables and
equipment up to the unoccupied top floors, strung a tightrope from the
roof of one tower to its twin in the dead of night, and then walked and
knelt and saluted and lay supine between them for the better part of a
morning hour. The feat sounds impressive on paper, but until you see
this documentary, you won’t realize how hushed and beautiful the
performance was, how completely it dazzled passersby and police. Man
on Wire is a magical account of a rare and unlikely “coup” (as
Petit called it) that can never be repeated.
The documentary is constructed like a thriller, with every
interview, archival scene, and black-and-white reenactment placed so as
to maximize suspense. Director James Marsh makes plenty of other
effective choices as well—I particularly like the delicately
seesawing Erik Satie that accompanies Petit’s performance. But Marsh
truly lucked out with his complex, contradictory subjects. Petit’s
impish persona (he used a unicycle to get around Paris and once stole a
wristwatch off a cop who was in the process of arresting him) belies
some serious engineering and managerial prowess. In new interviews, his
English seems not to have improved much since the 1970s, and colorfully
mangled idioms (“These twin towers are trotting in my head!”) let you
laugh at his sometimes-oppressive notion of the role that whimsy should
play in ordinary life. Another counterpoint is his girlfriend at the
time, a shy, green-eyed beauty whose memory of the events admirably
blends objectivity and awe.
