Man On Wire: 94 minutes. Rated: PG. Director: James Marsh.
Young @ Heart: 107 minutes. Rated: PG. Director: Stephen Walker.
In 1974, Philippe Petit balanced mortality and destiny on a wire between New York City's Twin Towers, then the tallest buildings in the world. It was the fulfilment of an existential quest that began many years earlier, when the philosophical acrobat Petit first saw a diagram in a magazine of the soon-to-be-built towers.
Man On Wire recreates Petit's dizzying pursuit of those towers. Director James Marsh gives the documentary the tension of a crime caper thriller, winding vivid monologues from Petit, and the friends and shady ring-ins who helped him, around dramatic recreations and field footage from the event itself.
Logistically, Petit's inspirational but illegal feat had the hallmarks of a bank heist. Transporting the heavy cable to the towers' peak and then rigging it was difficult enough. Discovery by security guards would mean the end of months of planning and years of dreaming. Petit and his accomplices needed to be discreet.
That's not to mention the more obvious dangers of balancing on a wire suspended 400 metres above the streets of Manhattan. It gets pretty windy up there. The physics of the feat itself required as much forethought and planning as the logistics of being in position to perform it.
At the centre of it all is Petit, the driven, charismatic and decidedly self-obsessed French acrobat. During the years prior the Twin Towers walk he trod wires atop the turrets of Notre Dame and the uprights of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. He waxes lyrical about the physical poetry of conquering such beautiful stages. It is inspiring, despite the temptation to question his sanity.
Seeing footage of the wire-walker Petit alone, afloat in space, you appreciate the loneness of his being. His closest friend, and his long-time girlfriend, faded from his life after helping him walk the Towers. They are less pragmatic about the parting of ways than he. It seems Petit's sense of destiny burned too hotly for these bonds to withstand it.
In contrast to Petit's unrelenting singularity of purpose, Young @ Heart, a very different but equally entertaining documentary in cinemas this week, is testament to the simple yet profound joy of having something to get out of bed for. For the members of the titular choir, mortality is not a mythical abstract. Their average age is