by Harry Lacey

Created on: December 20, 2008

Man on Wire is not simply a post-911 film about the World Trade Centre; neither is it merely a monologue about adventure, thrill and danger for its own sake; it is, fundamentally, an ode to the unknown, a graphic realisation of the void (literally, between the towers) of meaning that exists at the root of ambition. Phillipe Petit's absurdist narrative takes us from a dentist's waiting room to the heights of the girders that circled the roof of the twin towers. The concept - to wire-walk between each half of New York's newly-constructed, towering achievement. Why? There is no why.

Petit leads us, with uncontrollable enthusiasm, from the gestation of his dream in the aforementioned dentist's (when he happened upon an article detailing the construction of what would become the world's tallest skyscrapers), through his tight-rope navigations of both Notre Dame in Paris and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, past the preparations that would lead to the event and onto the roof of the towers themselves, where, under the cover of night, he and his band of followers suspended the cable and its guylines and waited for daybreak, when the performance would begin a quarter of a mile above Manhattan. In total, Petit spent forty-five minutes on the wire, only coming down because of a Police threat to pluck him from the sky with a helicopter.The magic of the picture is in its fantastical relaying of serious moments - hiding from security guards, conceiving of the plan, scooping the towers for ideas as to how to rig the cable. Much of what happens can, in fact come across as being quite sinister, due to the layers of subterfuge that surrounded the process. But the viewer is fully invited to share in Petit's unbridled excitement as he plans, experiments and practices, and when the act itself arrives, even the still photos manage to portray in stunning detail the audacity of his vision. From some angles, he appears to simply be floating on air.The plot is joyfully juvenile, at odds with anything anyone would have expected. As Petit himself said afterwards, "the Americans always asked, why? But there was no why." This was art for the sake of art, crime for the sake of crime - his eventual arrest comes across as being simply obligatory - nobody on screen is anything but wildly captivated by what is going on, and the proceedings seem to render in awe the watcher. Of course, the film's innocence is foregrounded mainly by its context; Petit's performance is a daring act of circus terrorism, an intervention to help to preserve the towers in posterity rather than destroy them; the movie, in fact, makes no mention of 911 and is all the better for it.It was not a protest, nor a publicity stunt, but a baptising gesture, an affirmation and the pursuit of an irrational passion. Despite flashes of a television broadcasting Nixon's 'crook' speech, the film is completely apolitical. In fact, Nixon's criminality serves as a backdrop for the incorruptible power of art, an artistic expression played out against the morning sky. Why? There is no why.

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