‘Skywalkers’ Takes Us to Dizzying Heights — But Only Physically

During the moments of quiet introspection — both of them – in Jeff Zimbalist and Maria Bukhonina’s high-rise climbing and posing documentary Skywalkers: A Love Story (new on Netflix after a short festival run that included Sundance and DocLands), I found myself thinking of another screen character with heights issues: San Francisco detective John “Scottie” Ferguson.

In my mind’s eye, I saw James Stewart clinging to a rooftop gutter in abject terror in the opening scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s devious Vertigo (1958). Terribly traumatized and trundled off to a quiet sanitarium to recover, the poor man could barely climb a curb. Scottie’s problem, I realized watching Skywalkers, was that he didn’t have an Instagram account, a camera-equipped drone and half a million followers.

Amusing as it is to imagine Stewart in the post-and-share digital age, it’s difficult to conceive of Ivan Beerkus and Angela Nikolau, the Russian protagonists of Skywalkers: A Love Story, existing without social media.

Zimbalist and Bukhonina strategically park the lure of likes and lust for fame in the back seat throughout Skywalkers, depicting Ivan and Angela as driven by high-level impulses like trust and artistic expression. I never completely bought it; the film’s thematic and narrative pretensions feel like window-dressing for a nonstop (excuse me, immersive) onslaught of breathtaking images of two extremely attractive athletes-turned-models perched atop cranes, skyscrapers and landmarks around the world.

Constructed and presented as an intimate portrait of a relationship under high stress, Skywalkers: A Love Story really belongs in the extreme-sports subgenre of documentary. Its main selling point — how rude of me to put it so crassly — is the visceral thrill of watching young people straining, sweating, swirling and twirling in extreme jeopardy while we cradle a cold IPA on our couch.

Thanks to the technologies of digital video, GoPro cameras and drones, the photography consistently finds the sweet spot between “incredible” and “impossible.” There are so many drop-dead gorgeous shots, in fact, that the filmmakers can package them like throwaways in quick-cut collages.

In those breathtaking aerial vistas, Angela and Ivan resemble Plasticine action figures as much as gravity-defying human beings. It’s a trick of the camera and the eye, but also a product of surface-level filmmaking.

The doc hooks us at the outset with the drama of Ivan and Angela trapped mid-climb in Merdeka 118, a massive yet elegant office building under construction in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Then Skywalkers introduces the duo via flashbacks that succinctly encapsulate their origin stories. Be advised that the backstories don’t interest the filmmakers except to the degree they can be used for thumbnail character definition and toe-deep psychological insight. Or to tie a bow around a character at the film’s climax.

Vanya had an unmemorable adolescence until he discovered rooftopping. “The higher I went, the easier it was to breathe,” he recalls. He’s neither a daredevil nor a rebel; his defining attribute appears to be a total lack of fear. His parents, like characters in a Nicholas Ray film, don’t understand him; they wish Vanya would accept the well-paying sales-rep job that dad has arranged through a friend.

Even the most risk-averse couch-sitter (i.e., your correspondent) silently cheers when Vanya respectfully passes on his dad’s invitation to enter the workaday world via the front door. It would be nice, though, if Skywalkers provided more details about Vanya’s sponsorship deals. But any focus on the protagonists as business operators would dilute the rush and romance of their high-altitude, high-risk endeavors.

Angela’s parents were circus performers who enrolled her in acrobatics training at a young age. She learned about partnership watching them in action — until her father left for another woman. “I made a rule,” Angela relates in voice-over. “Never depend on anyone but myself.”

While we wait for Dr. Freud to pick up the white courtesy telephone, Angela describes the chip on her shoulder (a combination of ambition and attitude) as the lone female rooftopper in Moscow. Even then, she tracked and marveled at Vanya’s globe-spanning accomplishments.

When they get together, the movie has our full attention. Not, as you might expect, because of added sexual tension — Skywalkers is more chaste than the average Disney animated film, weirdly. And while the greater complexities and complications of two-person climbs-slash-photo sessions are compelling, they don’t fully explain the film’s grip on us.

I think the presence of a second character works, in the case of both Angela and Vanya, to counteract the unattractive side effects of self-sufficiency: selfishness, ruthlessness, narcissism and indifference to their own well-being. I suppose I am describing the narrative (and occasionally illusory) dynamic implicit in team sports that we respond to, and often prefer to individual achievement.

Or it may simply be that we would prefer to share the thrill, the pride, the adrenaline rush of being 118 stories above Earth’s concrete surface with another like-minded person. (Note how many ads hawk a product or activity via the added presence of family or friends.) And who among us can’t identify with a couple arguing about the composition and quality of a photograph or a pose … standing on a slender vantage point a quarter of a mile up in the air?

Zimbalist, a prolific director and producer who scored out of the gate with Favela Rising (2005) and The Two Escobars (2010), is a master of breathless editing. His aesthetic combines a barrage of whiplash-quick cuts and close-up reaction shots into neatly packaged sequences that unambiguously convey their intended meaning. They are usually plot-related (i.e., storytelling blocks), but also serve to distill a character’s emotional state at that moment.

It is a kinetic kind of filmmaking that is very effective moment to moment but, in my view, doesn’t stick after the credits end. Skywalkers: A Love Story is entertaining and even mesmerizing, heightened by the possibility that a sudden slip by Angela or Vanya could change its trajectory, but even those stakes can’t alchemize glibness into profundity.

Perhaps you will be moved when Vanya’s father and mother share their pride with him at the end of Skywalkers. Or when Angela returns to Russia, as well, to present a gift to her grandmother. Maybe you will be inspired to take a selfie on your roof (and upload it, of course). Or, like Scottie, perhaps you will be relieved and thankful to feel your feet on the ground.

‘Skywalkers: A Love Story’ begins steaming on Netflix on July 19, 2024.