The first thing that strikes you is that image: a man slowly pacing through mid-air, doing that trick that only Looney Tune characters can do, before they realize they’re no longer supported by the ground beneath them and plummet to earth. Philippe Petit is walking on air.
Yet as you make out the cultural landmarks — the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris or the Sydney Harbour Bridge — you realize the man is not walking on air at all, but walking carefully along a steel wire. From a distance, the image is magical. It defies physics and everyday logic: a tiny fly perambulating in pure space. A tightrope is Petit’s calling card, and his performance art reached dizzying heights — a daring, beautiful walk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974 — as documented in the stylized Oscar winner, Man on Wire.
Petit was a street performer, juggler and mime in Paris who developed a steely confidence in his tightrope-walking skills. His first nervy stunt was secretly stringing — with the help of dedicated friends — a wire between Notre Dame’s towers. His walk there, captured on film, is astonishing, as is his later daring stunt in Sydney.
Petit gets it in his mind that he “must conquer” the World Trade Center (WTC) towers, which are newly under construction in 1970. With the help of accomplice Jean-Louis Blandeau and girlfriend Annie Allix, he stages countless visits to lower Manhattan upon its opening, forging ID passes to gain entry to the lobby of each tower, walking 110 floors up the stairs to inspect each roof, making sketches and taking photos. By August 1974, he has assembled a team, including an “inside man” — an employee of an insurance firm located in both towers — who helps gain Petit access to elevators (crucial in hauling hundreds of pounds of thick cable and other equipment to the roof).
But Marsh knows enough about storytelling to begin his story near the ending — with Petit and his crew hunkered down in total silence under thick tarps on the 109th floor of Tower A, waiting for a night watchman with a flashlight to complete his security rounds. The tension mounts as we flash backward and forward in the story — from old film clips of a younger Petit practicing on a backyard tightrope to Petit today, recounting his tale.
Throughout, director James Marsh takes a page from the Errol Morris book of documentary filmmaking: stylized recreations of events, real-life participants photographed against black backgrounds, a mesmerizing film score (by Michael Nyman, using old Peter Greenaway sound tracks, rather than the ubiquitous Philip Glass). Fortunately, his lead character, Petit, has not perished in subsequent high-wire stunts but is still around to tell Marsh’s camera a Gallic tale of rebellion and existential bravery. Is he embellishing this tale? Who knows? He weaves it quite well, regardless.
What makes a man want to walk between big, manmade structures high up in the sky? There are clues to Petit’s motivation (“You could ask the psychiatrist, about my need to escape or to be free, or something like that”), but no easy answers. What does come across is that Petit possesses what can only be called a criminal mind: he thinks in terms of how close he is to being caught or stopped at any moment; he rejoices whenever an opportunity arises that allows him to evade detection; he plots and plans his stunt for over a year, at a time when the WTC was new and already had heavy security measures in place. The implication is never stated outright, but it’s there in the opening shots: a van loaded with Petit, his accomplices and their equipment, trying to bluff their way into the WTC parking basement. These guys look like criminals — and they are. Viewed from another angle, the only thing separating them from the terrorists that took down the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001 is murderous intention.
Of course, in a pre-9/11 world, the concept of the prank still had some validity in the world. You could joke about things, and people wouldn’t throw you in a bottomless cell somewhere 90 miles off the coast of Miami. American pranksters like Abbie Hoffman — who engineered the throwing of fake dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in 1967, causing a near-riot; or Allen Ginsberg participating in an enchanted “encircling” of the Pentagon in 1967 to levitate it and “exorcise” its demons — were understood as harmless political statements. Public performance art, but with a point. Not so easy to joke in public, after 9/11.
Petit’s stunt is harder to categorize. He was not making a bold political statement, more just showing that anything mankind could build, he could traverse. May he did it for fame, or recognition. Truth is, Marsh’s intriguing film raises more questions about Petit than it answers. What happened to Petit after the WTC walk in mid-air? We know he was briefly arrested by the NYPD, the police blotter citing “Man on wire” as the complaint; he got fined for “trespassing” and “disturbing the peace,” ultimately. Later he wrote a book about his exploits, but as to the intervening years, nothing is said. What about Petit’s friendship with Jean-Louis and the dedicated Annie, which seems to unravel after he completes the WTC walk? And who funded his adventures? It took many plane trips to the US before Petit made his move; he even hired a helicopter to fly above the towers and take video, to better understand his challenge. Man on Wire chooses not to examine Petit’s background or funding.
Instead, you get a hell of a great story about a guy committed to his goal, however curious or crazy-seeming. Petit explains that his walk would be hampered by wind conditions, 1,350 feet above the ground; cross cables would need to be secured, to reduce wobble and bounce. His team simply fires an arrow tied with fishing line to initially cover the 200 feet between the towers; a length of rope is then dragged across, followed by the heavy cable.
Then, holding only a simple pole, Petit sets out at 7:30 a.m. on August 7, 1974, and to all those watching from below, it must have seemed like some kind of insect boldly marching into space. Within minutes, police were amassed on the Tower roofs, ready to apprehend the French daredevil. This only emboldened Petit, who did his signature trick of lying down on the cable, smiling as he approached the police then heading back out into space for his 15 minutes of fame. The shots of passersby gazing upwards at the towers in awe and wonder now have a more tragic dimension, post-9/11, but for Petit’s long-suffering girlfriend Annie, “it was so beautiful… Even if he died, it would be so beautiful…” Only the French, perhaps, could have such an aesthete’s view of the high-wire divide between art and death.