Stunning 1974 ropewalk between Twin Towers recounted in ‘Man On Wire’

Marsh assembles the early scenes like a crime thriller, beginning on the day before “Le Coup,” as Petit calls it. On Aug. 6, as Richard Nixon tells the nation “I am not a crook,” another kind of break-in is in progress. Disguised as businessmen in suits, and construction workers, Petit and his rag-tag team of accomplices enter both towers, hustle their equipment up fire stairs and freight elevators, and hide out on the vacant top floors to await nightfall —when they will stretch their cables across the adjacent towers, 1,350 feet above the city, in preparation for the morning’s illegal performance.

Abetted by interviews with Petit’s girlfriend, Annie, his longtime tech expert, Jean-Lois, and the rest of the team, along with plenty of vintage footage, Marsh then detours into the backstory of the singular Petit. A self-taught tightrope walker from a very young age, he claims he “discovered my dream” in a dentist’s waiting room one day when he saw a magazine story (including an artist’s rendering) of the proposed Twin Towers. Training on ropes strung between trees in the back yard evolves into trial runs: across the two towers of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in 1971; across another pair of towers on the bridge over Sydney Harbor in Australia, in 1973.

Footage of these two feats is remarkable, especially in the Zen stoicism with which Petit comports himself on the high wire. He never just traipses across the cable once; holding his balance bar, he might go back and forth several times, or lower himself to one knee, or, most serenely of all, lie down flat on his back in contemplation of a sky suddenly, astonishingly close. Home movies of Petit and cohorts practicing in a field in rural France expand the action, as do scenes (re-enacted, for obvious reasons) of the crew’s adventures in the Towers the night before Le Coup.

Petit is an engaging, mischievous presence onscreen, articulate and persuasive in two languages. He never comes across as a fanatic or an egotist, but rather a serious artist with the unshakable skill and focus to believe—and achieve—the impossible. While his friends admit to being worried, if not terrified at the risk, Petit coped with danger by embracing it. “If I die,” he says, in retrospect, “what a beautiful death. To die in the exercise of your passion.”

As to legalities, no one on Petit’s team cared. “It was against the law, but not wicked or mean” recalls one. “It was wonderful!” And so it is in Marsh’s finale, when newsreel footage reveals Petit at the literal height of his powers, marching between the Towers, smiling, stretching out in languid ease on his cable, and eluding teams of NYPD cops waiting to grab him at either end by turning around just out of their reach to cross and recross the wire eight times.

Everything changed for the participants once Petit’s spectacular walk concluded. (For one thing, he was arrested for “trespassing,” and bundled off for psychiatric evaluation.) A bittersweet coda in which they each seem to realize the enormity of what they did, what they were, and perhaps what’s been lost, provides resonance. But the film belongs to Petit dancing across the sky. In a summer of CGI blockbusters, it may be the most magical image you’ll ever see onscreen.

MAN ON WIRE

**** (out of four)

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