Whenever New York City policemen reached out to grab him, Petit would pirouette away. One of the cops, speaking to the press later in awed tones, described him as a "tightrope dancer, because you couldn't call him a walker." In the photos, the young daredevil wears a blissful, concentrated grin.
The stunt was illegal, obviously - you can't exactly get a permit for this sort of thing - and the preparations had the urgent, scrupulously planned dimensions of a bank heist. That's how director James Marsh films them, too, employing hazy black-and-white reenactments to dramatize Petit and his group of French friends and American sympathizers smuggling their equipment to the upper floors of the Tower buildings on the night of Aug. 6.
"Man on Wire" periodically backs up to fill in the spaces of Petit's childhood and his early acts of high-wire guerrilla theater - the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge - but the film keeps looping back to the slow run-up to the Trade Center walk, waiting for the sun to rise over Manhattan. Goosed by the repurposed minimalism of Michael Nyman's music on the soundtrack (if you've seen any Peter Greenaway movies, you'll be having déjà vu), the suspense is palpable and occasionally pokey. When Petit and an accomplice hide from a security guard under a tarp, the hours pass by like hours.
Interspersed are modern-day interviews with Petit and his band of outsiders, and the contrast between then and now couldn't be more striking. In the early-'70s footage that preserves the planning sessions and backyard wirewalking, the conspirators are all hippie innocents toying with a beautiful, enormous idea. Today, they're white-haired or balding, smiling and occasionally weeping with reminiscence, and to a man, they know better. The one female on board, Petit's then-girlfriend Annie Allix, is a silent worshipful presence in the old films and very much her own woman today.
