Man on Wire

Marsh cleverly treats the plans like something out of vintage caper flicks from the era, like The Sicilian Clan and The Hot Rock,
with a motley assemblage of unlikely associates on the team (such as
incessant pothead/musician David aka Donald Foreman) and a distinctly
European mindset (friend Jean-Louis Heckel recalls about his undercover
activities, “To look like an American, I had a lot of pens in my
pocket.”) There’s even a brief reference that Petit prepped himself
emotionally by watching film noir heist melodramas. Still, Petit’s
then-girlfriend Annie Allix remembers Philippe’s dogged concentration
toward his quest: “It felt like those towers belonged to him, as if
they had been built especially for him.” 

Petit, of course, was no stranger to
such derring-do: Clips show his June 1971 high-wire act between the
towers of Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral and a June 1973 crossing of a
harbor bridge’s towers in Sydney, Australia. Yet Petit’s edifice
complex found its match with the World Trade Center’s 1,350-foot-high
skyscrapers. In Man on Wire’s most surreal black-and-white
moment, Marsh imagines Petit and his crew fumbling amid a nighttime
crisis at the top of the world, as they resort to archery to launch a
cable between the North and South Towers, with only a multitude of
shining stars to light their way. 

The aftermath, which includes some
annoyed Port Authority cops forced to witness the wonderment before
booking Petit, as well as a very Gallic moment when Petit partakes of
“pleasures of the flesh” with an anonymous admirer, provides just a few
of this documentary’s lovingly detailed flourishes. Yet such
exhilaration fuses with a sad sense of nostalgia throughout this film,
as the 21st century tragedy that will befall the Twin Towers and change
the world is deliberately left unmentioned. Man on Wire pays
twin tributes to a famed American landmark and a jaw-dropping human
stunt that can never be replicated. Because they’re not there.