A Kiwi documentary looks at what makes extreme athletes want to take the plunge.
If delivering one tightrope thriller in a year wasn’t enough, New Zealand director Toa Fraser has two. As well as the hostage-crisis drama reviewed here, he’s made this moderately intriguing extreme-sports movie, starring champion Kiwi freestyle skier Jossi Wells and Gallic daredevils the Flying Frenchies.
Fraser, who narrates and interviews, is after something more than an extended energy drink ad; he also wants to make this a contemplation of the philosophy driving people who spend much of their life plummeting to earth in creative ways.
To give it some story drive, the film contrives to follow Wells as he is welcomed and trained by the Frenchies in slacklining – tightrope walking across webbing straps. The squad’s speciality is suspending their lines between peaks high enough to allow base-jumping. Or between hot-air balloons.
Eventually, the film shifts away from Wells’s valiant efforts to an extended study of the crew Fraser calls the “poets of the mountain”, whose members offer much philosophising about facing “the void” before there is yet another vertigo-inducing plunge.
Wells comes across as a thoughtful good sport, and discussion of his career comes with an inevitable montage of X-rays from too many unhappy landings. But he’s sidelined as the film progresses and the portrait of him feels unfinished.
The credits, which thank American big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton, who is unseen in the final cut, suggest The Free Man intended to go wider with its probe into the psychology of extreme athletes. It does poignantly illustrate that life as a death-defying daredevil can be as short as it is exciting.
But any clear answers to Fraser’s why-do-they-do-it thesis are drowned out by the sound of another Frenchie leaping into the void.
IN CINEMAS NOW
★★★
This article was first published in the September 16, 2017 issue of the New Zealand Listener.