Recalling Philippe Petit’s outrageous, death-defying ‘heist’. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

WELLINGTON’s opening night film, Man on Wire, got the gala treatment the night before, and it’s easy to see why the story would be a crowd-pleasing one: an eccentric Frenchman decides to pull the middle finger at a conformist and regulated society and walk across a wire. Four hundred metres above the ground, suspended between the obviously now gone Twin Towers in New York. Without telling the authorities. With a slack cable. If you’ve got a fear of heights, this is probably not the film for you.

Philippe Petit won his fifteen-minutes of fame with this heist in 1974, and some have called it the “artistic crime of the century”. The story is re-told with Petit and his fellow co-conspirators almost gleefully recounting their version of the events. The film also cleverly adds in re-created footage, and the attention to Petit’s outrageous coup is lovingly retold. The result is a tale of obsession, determination, cheekiness and courage and the end result of it all, is a moment of perfection.

That said, the documentary did struggle to leave me with the same feeling of perfection. Part of the problem was the lack of the money shot: actual footage of Petit walking across the rope up there. Obviously if it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist, but the sense of the sublime moment was lost, simply because we couldn’t feel that moment. Instead, we’re forced to hear how amazing the moment was, rather than the long uninterrupted shot that would have truly captured it. The film also over-compensates by chucking Satie on the soundtrack to accompany the photos – aesthetically Satie’s contemplative ambience fit well with the tone of Petit’s stunt. However the Gymnopédie really has entered the realm of cliché (Michael Nyman’s Greenaway back-catalogue worked better throughout the film, even if Greenaway fans might struggle to disentangle themselves from the music’s original context). The film’s lack of context (especially in the stunt’s aftermath – a rather unnecessary sex scene) might jar a little too for the cynics, but it’s clear that the film was building towards the moment of art. Who really cares about the hangover? This is entertaining stuff, the build-up works like a thriller, and it’s hard not to savour Petit’s enthusiasm in recounting the day he reached the peak of his craft.