film: Man on Wire

This is an amazing documentary about a French chappy called Phillipe Petite. He’s an extraordinary fellow in many ways, not least because he likes nothing more than the high-wire. Or tightrope walking to you and I.

Anyway, as a kid he sees pictures of the Twin Towers in a magazine article and dreams of walking between the two of them. Yeah. Normal kid’s dream that one. This movie documents what happened next…and let me tell you it’s simply unbelievable.

Part documentary, part re-enactment, Man on Wire charts the extraordinary story of a man on a mission. He’s French, his name is Philippe Petit - or small Philip to you and I – and he’s a high-wire artist. Not content with amusing his friends in the back garden, Phillipe decides he wants to commit the artistic crime of the century by tightrope walking between the 2 towers of the World Trade Center. Will he? Won’t he?

We’ve got a great deal to thank the French for. OK – c’mon there’s the cheese, the fine wines, the quality ski resorts, the literature and the fine art of surrendering. And you’ve got to give it our dear French friends that noone in the world can match them…for their sheer unbridled arrogance, their rudeness, their diffidence, their machismo, their o-la la, merde-a-lor je ne sais qoui-i-oi-ee-u.

Phillippe Petit might well be the most self-assured man alive. More so than George W Bush, Barack Obama, Simon Cowell and all the world’s traffic warden’s combined into one giant puffed up mega-testicle of irritation. But, but, but, my friends, here’s the thing. It’s damn hard to dislike Phillippe. Indeed, by the end of the film I’ll go as far as saying that you’ll love him. Not in a “homo-sexual” way. Just a bit.

You see small Philip is one of the most eloquent men you are ever likely to come across. When he talks about his love of the high wire, and his lifelong love affair for the twin towers, it’s like listening to a poet. Well a French poet without any rhymes, but let’s not get fussy here. You forgive him for his self-belief because you realise that it’s necessary. How else could a man walk across a very small thin wire a gazillion feet in the air with no protection. Unless…it was magic.

But it’s not magic. It’s for real. And here’s the other great thing about this movie, because it’s for real Small Philip and his little group of cheese-eating-surrender-monkey helpers had to get into the Twin Towers without getting detected. They couldn’t just walk into reception and go “hi mate….we’d like to go to the top floor. There we’ll lay some cable between your twin towers, I’ll then walk over it..oh – without protection any protection at all…and…yes..I’ll probably die by dropping thousands of feet and…if that wasn’t enough…I’ll probably also kill some other people when I land on top of them so them will be lots of blood on the floor…but it will loook like jam so I suspect all the tourists will drop to their knees and lick it up like hungry confectionary dogs sucking at a giant bowl of canine fructose reduction. So…would it be ok if I just went up…with me and my mates?” Of course, they couldn’t say that. They had to get in undetected didn’t they, like French rats up a really really massive American drainpipe.

So what you end up with is a part thriller: Will they, won’t they? And a sort of philosophical treatise, and poetry-fest and study into human nature. Is it good? You betya! This is refreshing as a night in the Waltons’ family freezer unit. It’s out now to rent or download, and rent or download it you must. 4 stars!

For the best of the rest:

The Sunday Times:
On an August morning in 1974, a French street performer named Philippe Petit spent 45 strange and wonderful minutes alone, in the air, at a height of 1,350ft, balancing on a slim steel wire that connected the newly constructed World Trade Centre towers.

The Guardian:
Before the acrobats of Parkour and the gonzo activists of free-running, before the situationist-anarchists of skateboarding in California’s Dogtown, who covertly drained suburban swimming-pools to ride their sky-blue curves, there was Philippe Petit.

The New York Times:
On the morning of Aug. 7, 1974, after months of preparation and years of dreaming, a French daredevil named Philippe Petit stepped into the sky above Lower Manhattan. For almost 45 minutes he ambled back and forth on a metal cable strung between the towers of the World Trade Center, a feat of illegal tightrope walking that, according to a New York Police Department sergeant who recounted Mr. Petit’s act of physical poetry in dry press-conference prose, would more aptly be described as dancing.