Cable Guy is man on wire

Question of balance: Philippe Petit wire walks between the pylons of Sydney Harbour Bridge
10 April 2012

This is the story of Philippe Petit, who in August 1970 walked a high wire between New York’s fated Twin Towers, then the world’s tallest buildings. After nearly an hour dancing on the wire, he was arrested, taken for psychological tests and put in jail before a belated release. "He speaks in French because he’s a Frenchman," says a puzzled member of the NYPD.
The stunt itself is illustrated in James Marsh’s film only by photographs, presumably because Petit’s greatest feat was never filmed. But it remains an extraordinary sequence, well worth waiting for. Otherwise, Marsh presents Petit as a kind of acrobatic Werner Herzog, talented, eccentric and perhaps slightly crazy.

His previous illegal coups were high-wiring between the two spires of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris (in the middle of a mass), and between the giant northern pylons of Sydney Harbour Bridge. He’s clearly a genius of a sort — but with accomplices who prepared the ground for him surreptitiously and are drawn into tears by the memory of it all.

Man On Wire
Cert: 12A

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