Pun Salad

This is a documentary about Philippe Petit, a Frenchman who wirewalked between the World Trade Center towers on August 7, 1974. Petit was a street performer, doing juggling and magic tricks for urban crowds. But his joy was in tightrope-walking, and his obsessive target, ever since he saw the plans, was the WTC. He had previously done similar stunts on Paris's Notre Dame Cathedral and the Sydney Harbor Bridge.

There's a "caper" aspect to the story, covering the sneaking around that led up to the unauthorized and illegal stunt. (Much of this part is done via re-enactments.) Also there's some (underplayed) engineering: how to get a 3/4" cable across 140 feet of empty space a quarter-mile above the ground. But most of the film is interviews with Petit and the present-day versions of his 1974 coterie. Petit is a charming motormouth, used to speaking in poetic terms about his feat, and this works OK.

There's no explicit reference in the film to 9/11, but that context is present for anyone who watches. For me, it demonstrated the stark contrast between Petit's obsessive courage and joy in an ultimately harmless prank and the cowardly death and destruction over a quarter century later.