Is there such a thing as the perfect crime? Dostoevsky explored its moral depths, Hitchcock orchestrated its suspenseful geometry, but James Marsh, with Man on Wire, films its purest essence, poetically useless and, for this reason, absolutely necessary. The documentary does not simply tell the story of Philippe Petit and his illegal tightrope walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on August 7, 1974. No, it does something much more astute and dizzying: it orchestrates the entire narrative like a heist movie, where the loot is not material but consists of the theft of a moment of sublimity, a break-in into the collective imagination. “Le coup,” as Petit himself calls it with his charismatic, almost Mephistophelean energy, is not a bank robbery, but a blow to the heart of reality.

The structure is that of an unmistakable classic of the genre, Jules Dassin's Rififi stripped of its nihilistic violence and cloaked in an aura of mad lyricism. There is the charismatic and obsessed leader (Petit, a cross between an elf and a Napoleonic general), the team of accomplices (each with a role, each with their doubts), the meticulous planning, the maps, the disguises, the nighttime infiltration of the “vault” – the two towers still untouched, almost alien in their modernist gigantism. Marsh uses interviews with the protagonists not as mere talking heads recalling the past, but as narrators of a thriller they are reliving, with the sweat and anxiety of forty years ago still etched on their faces. The reconstructions, shot in grainy, almost dreamlike black and white, are not didactic; they are fragments of a noir dream, visions that fill in the gaps in the photographic documentation and amplify the tension to the point of making it almost unbearable.

But who is Philippe Petit? He is not an athlete, he is not a circus performer in the traditional sense of the term. He is a figure who seems to have stepped out of a Borges story, a man who decides to impose a straight and fragile line—a steel cable—on the ruthless geometry of Manhattan, creating a living paradox. He is a capricious demiurge, a trickster who plays with the laws of physics and society. His obsession has no pragmatic logic; it is the obsession of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, who wants to build an opera house in the jungle. It is the search for a sublime that is not found in the wild nature of the Romantics, but in the artificial heart of the metropolis, in the void created by man. Petit does not climb a mountain; he walks on air between two monuments to human ambition, transforming them for 45 minutes into something else, into a pedestal for an act of pure, gratuitous beauty. In that moment, the towers cease to be offices and become cathedrals.

Context is key. The New York of 1974 is not the glittering capital of the world we imagine today. It is a city on the brink of bankruptcy, dirty, dangerous, an asphalt jungle where cynicism reigns supreme. The Twin Towers, newly completed, are not yet the beloved symbols they will become. Many see them as two arrogant, soulless parallelepipeds, a wound in the sky. Petit's feat is an act of poetic reappropriation. A French street artist, with a daring that borders on madness, makes a mockery of security, bureaucracy, and gravity itself, and gives the city an epiphany. For almost an hour, he forces thousands of hurried New Yorkers to stop, look up, and collectively hold their breath, united in an almost childlike amazement. It is a work of performance art that anticipates large-scale installations by decades, a gesture that infuses those steel and glass structures with a mythological soul.

And here lies the film's most profound and heartbreaking power. Marsh makes a directorial choice of unprecedented power: he never once mentions the towers' ultimate fate. 9/11 is the most present absence in the history of documentary cinema. This elision transforms Man on Wire into an unwitting elegy, a funeral dirge for a lost innocence. Watching the images of Petit dancing serenely among the clouds, with the towers silhouetted against the morning sky like two benevolent twin deities, we are transported to a pre-lapsarian era, a time when the greatest threat to those giants was the imagination of a dreamer. The film is not a monument to the WTC, but a ghost that evokes its life, not its death. It restores the towers to us as they were conceived: not as a target or a tomb, but as a blank canvas for human audacity. The soundtrack, which alternates between Michael Nyman's propulsive, minimalist scores (clearly indebted to Philip Glass and the music that defined the soul of that New York) and the ethereal melancholy of Erik Satie's Gymnopédies, is the perfect musical commentary on this feeling of nostalgia for a future that never was.

The film, however, does not limit itself to celebrating the feat. It also explores its human cost, the bittersweet descent after the ascent. Once back on earth, the Icarus who did not burn himself must face the earthly consequences. Fame, arrest (the most surreal in history), but above all the disintegration of the group. His friends, the accomplices who risked everything for his dream, are cast aside. Loyalty cracks, friendship dissolves in the overflowing ego of the artist who has accomplished the impossible. The last part of the film is imbued with a deep melancholy. After touching the sky, walking on earth again seems like a sentence. The magic fades, leaving behind the shards of human relationships. It is the dark side of every great undertaking: the loneliness of genius, the inability to fully share an experience that, by its very nature, can only belong to those who have experienced it firsthand, up there, on the wire.

Man on Wire transcends the documentary genre. It is a philosophical essay on the relationship between order and chaos, between rigid architecture and the fragile organicity of the human body. It is a psychological thriller about obsession. It is a modern fairy tale about a man who walked on clouds. And above all, it is a powerful cinematic séance that resurrects two ghosts of steel and glass, not to remind us how they fell, but to celebrate the one moment when, thanks to a mad poet of the void, they learned to dance. It is the story of a perfect crime because its author stole nothing but gave everything: an indelible memory, a surrealist image—worthy of a Magritte who mistook his canvas for the Manhattan sky—burned into the memory of a city and, thanks to this film, the whole world.