| MAN ON WIRE (2008) : J.Marsh : 7/10 |
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 Herzog: What I do is for spectators. Whether Philippe's walk between the Twin Towers was witnessed by anyone down in the street really didn't matter. Philippe once secretly put a cable across a 2,400-foot ravine and walked across it and danced on the rope. Only a farmer who was driving his cattle at sunrise realised that someone was there. He rushed into the village to wake a policeman. And when they came back on a motorcycle, there was no Philippe, there was no wire left.Petit: But the cows remember. Esquire, August 2008 They couldn't be much more different in terms of style or subject-matter, but Man On Wire seems to be turning into this year's Lives of Others: i.e., a film which is rapturously received by audiences at film-festivals - MoW won the audience awards at Sundance and Edinburgh, and at the latter an enraptured Sean Connery declared it one of the top three movies he'd ever seen - and then arthouses, but leaves certain critics [myself included] relatively lukewarm in their measured enthusiasm. There are many better German films in recent years than The Lives of Others; and there's no shortage of documentaries that are superior to Man On Wire. There's certainly a lot to like about James Marsh's tribute to Philippe Petit, the tightrope-walker who became world-famous back in 1974 when, with the aid of a 28-foot balancing-pole, he "danced" between the twin towers of Manhattan's newly-constructed World Trade Center, 1,350 feet up. It's a remarkable tale, and Petit - whose To Walk in the Clouds, published in 2002 to coincide with the first anniversary of the towers' destruction, is the main source-material - is an irresistibly engaging presence at all times, the one constant as Marsh switching between interviews conducted for this film, and copious archive materials from more than three decades ago. But the careful evasion of mentioning 9/11 at all seems a strange decision (the absence of an absence, if you like) - especially as Petit's coup gave a valuable boost to the WTC's somewhat controversial public profile in 1974. In addition, countless questions are allowed to go unanswered and/or unasked (Petit's girlfriend, rather unceremoniously dumped in the aftermath of his sudden global celebrity, gets particularly short shrift); countless fascinating alleyways are left unexplored (a long-time pal of Werner Herzog, Petit has been artist-in-residence at New York's Cathedral of St John the Divine since 1980); the score is, perhaps for budgetary reasons, an odd patchwork of distractingly over-familiar tracks (Michael Nyman's back catalogue is, for some unknown reason, particularly raided wholesale). And while it's nice to see Petit and pals in bucolic early-seventies France (seemingly untroubled by financial concerns, they seem to have had a movie-camera running at nearly all times), it's disappointing that there's so little footage of his WTC feat itself: we have to make do with tantalising stills, plus eyewitness testimony and recollections from Petit. Most priceless among the latter is his typically delightful, throwaway comment that during his hour-long funambulation (eight times back and forth!) he was able to get surprisingly close to Manhattan's airborne fauna - "dialogue with the seagull" is how he puts it. Then again, Petit's facility on the wire, while astonishing, isn't necessarily an entirely good thing in terms of Man On Wire itself: "dancing" rather than "walking" up there, there was clearly hardly any real chance of his coming to any actual harm. And of course his presence in the present (so to speak) robs us of any proper "suspense" (so to speak.) Then again, as All the President's Men reminds us (and, though you wouldn't know it from the movie, Nixon resigned the day after Petit's "artistic crime" made worldwide headlines) being aware of the ending doesn't always rob a movie of tension. It's the procedures that count, and on that basis Marsh's numerous ploys (including thriller-style black-and-white reconstructions that emphasise the illicit nature of Petit's transcendental stunt) mostly come off - though it would have been nice to learn more about the jaw-dropping way (involving a bow-and-arrow!) the five-eights-of-an-inch-thick wire was positioned between the towers. This is a rock-solid, engrossing example of a kind of non-fiction cinema which is experiencing a boom-time right now - but to acclaim it as somehow the cream of the crop (especially when such vastly superior work as The Call of the Wild, Profit motive and the whispering wind and casting a glance, to name but three, seem doomed to relative obscurity) seems short-sighted indeed. The crowds, of course, have been going wild (again) - but you do have to step back and ask the question: is it really Marsh they're applauding, or is it Petit? Neil Young 26./27.Aug.08  UK/USA 94m (BBFC timing) director : James Marsh (The King, The Team, Wisconsin Death Trip.) editor : Jinx Godfrey (The King, The Team, Wisconsin Death Trip.) seen 13.Aug.08 Newcastle (The Tyneside Cinema : £6.85)  |
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