Man on Wire

Herald rating:

* * * * *

Verdict:

Stunning doco about the artistic crime of the century.

Perhaps another film has made use of Ralph Vaughan Williams' hauntingly beautiful tone poem The Lark Ascending, but it can never have seemed more right than it does at the climax of this superb documentary.

That soaring, piercingly beautiful violin obbligato accompanies still photographs - no moving footage was ever shot - of the French funambuliste extraordinaire Philippe Petit as he walks on a cable between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. It is the most heartstoppingly sublime of many great moments in a mesmerising, and sometimes toe-curlingly dizzying, movie.

The facts are a matter of record: on August 7, 1974, Petit stepped out into the thin air between the barely completed towers and began a performance that became known as the artistic crime of the century.

Using interview, re-enactment and some archival material, director James Marsh takes the idea back to its improbably prosaic origins and charts the years of meticulous preparation involving a team of half a dozen, all of whom are interviewed.

Indeed part of the charm of the film, which takes its title from the words with which a rather bemused cop headed his incident report, is that it clearly conveys how Petit's 45-minute sortie ("walk" is an inadequate word here) was a team effort.

In the shadow of 9/11, this story takes on a kind of mythopoetic grandeur. The filmmakers deliberately use no shots of that terrible day, which consigned the events of 1974 to what Petit calls "the domain of legend". But echoes remain. Among the duties of Annie Allix, the team's sole woman member, was to look up from the street and point, so as to make Petit, otherwise a mere speck in the sky, visible to the world.

As she recalls her first sight of him ("tellement beau [so beautiful]," she keeps repeating), she involuntarily looks up again, remembering. Her pose seems to foreshadow the ones 27 years later, of New Yorkers looking up in a very different kind of awe.

- Peter Calder

Director:

James Marsh

Running time:

90 mins

Rating:

M (contains nudity) In English and French with English subtitles

Screening:

Rialto