Man on Wire, A Movie Review

We’re cuddled staring at the television, and the Frenchwoman’s eyes pierce through at us as she remembers the man on the tightrope, her lover on the wire. And she stood below on the ground below the twin towers looking up to see his small black silhouette against the vast sky, floating, dancing on air because the wire was too thin to see from 104 floors below, or maybe it was more floors. I don’t remember that part of the documentary. I remember the Frenchwoman’s eyes as she gazed through the camera to tell us, It was beautiful, the most beautiful thing, and she gasped. It was all in French, with white subtitles flashing a translation of her words, but not her gasps.

I turned to him and asked if he thought, like I did, that the story was perfect in French. I’m glad this is in French, I said. All of it was in French, the story of how Philippe Petit saw an article about the twin towers to-be. At sixteen, he read the article in a dentist’s office and tore it out of the magazine after drawing a thin line with his pen between the two towers. And in French, the documentary narrated through the making of his plans, his practicing, and of his girlfriend who stood always on his back lawn watching him practice across the high wire strung between two platforms in his back yard, practice across the bridge in Austrailia, and across the towers of Notre Dame. She stood below in his backyard and then years later, she watched him walk eight times between the towers, and it was beautiful, like French.

Impressed

He leaves early in the morning for school.  It’s dark and icy outside, and inside for that matter. This morning I remembered how impressive it is that he can just get out of bed, right when his alarm rings. Impressive because I cannot do that and isn’t that what makes something impressive to each of us? It is impressive when someone does something that we struggle ourselves to do, like getting out of bed. Even at 8:00 this morning, I couldn’t pull myself up out of the gray sheets. I snoozed my alarm, every ten minutes, for an entire hour. I surfaced just before 9, with class at 9:30am. Walking out of our back door, I collided with the frozen air, like a truck going full speed into a brick wall. I don’t like that image. Just know that it was cold. I walked to school quickly. I could feel a slow spreading of frozen flesh that seemed to start at the top of my ears and spread downward until even my earlobe was past feeling, just cold and stiff like stone.  And why don’t people shovel their sidewalks? The walk down to school was treacherous as I had to cross sheets of solid ice on sidewalks, bumpy solid ice that slid me off balance and into the road where I decided to stay, because I could walk there, uninhibited by snow and ice, just cars. I’m always cold and wary of winter. The ice on the sidewalks is treacherous, the cold air is akin to a brick wall, and when he gets out of bed early in the morning, I’m cold and alone in the dark. I get to school and want to complain—complain and whine about the cold and the ice on the sidewalks, but then I see that everyone else walked to school too. In that moment, I’m impressed with their ability to do something that I cannot do myself. I cannot walk in the cold, in the ice, in the bone crunching and crippling air without complaint.