After a short, hot, crowded shuffle through the stalls of the Newtown Festival on Sunday we were ready to escape to the cool, dark confines of the Dendy cinema to watch 'Man On Wire'. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, but knew that the doco received unanimously good reviews from critics and won the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary at Cannes.
No wonder it was such an entertaining experience. Previously, I had carried a vague smudge of memory around that someone a long, long time ago walked between the Twin Towers, but I had never for a minute stopped to consider the beauty and magnitude of such an act.
Much of the documentary focused on the planning and preparations for "the coup" which eventuated on August 7, 1974 (a bit more than 3 months after I was born). Phillipe Petit (the wire walker) relied heavily on his circle of friends, and for the final act on a small number of ring-ins, to achieve such an amazing feat. All the main players were interviewed 27 years on, and they all appear to recall the events with perfect clarity and a depth of emotion. Petit's retelling of the events was hilarious and deeply engaging, however the real hero of the piece emerges as we discover that the practical planning behind the wire walk was masterminded by Petit's close friend Jean-Louis Blondeau. I don't want to ruin the rest of the story other than to say that the viewer is left with a somewhat tarnished admiration for Petit, but admiration nevertheless.
One interesting fact about Phillipe Petit's high wire antics that I had not known prior to seeing the film is that Petit walked suspended between the northern pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1973. The old footage of the Bridge is pure gold and reason enough to see the film.
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