"Man on Wire": The edgy, elegant epitome of high art

It is both a work of art and an act so simple as to require almost no description: A man, assisted only by a balance pole, walks on a wire stretched taut between two buildings. He is, it should be noted, a quarter-mile above the Manhattan sidewalks, without a safety harness. It is 1974, and those buildings are the recently completed Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. He crosses eight times, seemingly effortlessly, at times sitting and lying down on the wire. "Something that I could not resist, and did not make any effort to resist, called me upon that cable," he says, decades later.

"Man on Wire," James Marsh's spellbinding documentary about Philippe Petit's "artistic crime of the century," should be watched on the biggest screen possible; it's an utterly thrilling exploration of one man's mad dream.

Petit, then just 24, assembled a ragtag group of conspirators to help him pull off the stunt, depicted (mostly through contemporary interviews and a wealth of archival still photos) as an almost-comedic heist. The movie has a light, almost goofy tone for its first two-thirds, as the complications leading up to the walk are recounted — and then, as he steps onto that wire, you suddenly realize that you're not breathing. As his then-girlfriend Annie Allix (who was watching from the ground) says in the film, "It was like he was walking on a cloud."

Petit — a wiry Frenchman with an impish smile and a knack for elegant phraseology ("Death is looking through the golden frame of this dream," he noted of his quest) — is a born storyteller, and his revisiting of his younger self's work is rich with suspense and detail. (A dark elevator shaft travels, he asks, "to what heaven?") We see footage of earlier walks: between the spires of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, high above a freeway bridge in Sydney, Australia. In the blurry '70s film, the wire seems to fade away, leaving only a black-clad man calmly strolling on air. Madness, clearly, was Petit's calling card; unspeakable danger was simply part of the territory. But the sheer audaciousness of the walks is part of what makes them beautiful: so simple and yet so outrageous, a slippered foot delicately chasing another along its tiny path.

The film never mentions the Sept. 11 attacks that felled the towers, keeping its focus on a time so long ago that Petit and his gang were able to spend the night before the walk in the south tower, secretly erecting the wire and rigging without detection. (How did they get in, and how did they get the supplies up? It's a long story; you'll have to hear them tell it.) But throughout there's a lingering shadow, making the film a subtle yet moving elegy for something lost. When Petit mentions the possibility that, on that August day, he might "fall to another life," or when a still photo shows a plane flying close to the tower, it's impossible not to think of another day, far in the future.

"Man on Wire," however, keeps us in that brighter, magical 1974 day, when New Yorkers looked into the sky and saw nothing but wonder — and art.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725

or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com