In the mode (but not the spirit) of documentaries like “Man on Wire,” “Free Solo,” and “Fire of Love,” “Skywalkers: A Love Story” is less about persistence, curiosity, and daring than it is about two careless adrenaline junkies taking ridiculous risks to get likes on social media. As the title indicates, writer Jeff Zimbalist wants to think of this as a romance about people who happen to climb to the top of tall buildings so they can post pictures on Instagram. His script makes the point over and over that it’s all a symbol of the same issues of intimacy and trust that all couples face. We can never quite settle into the connection to the couple because while it makes it indisputably clear, despite some claims of Photoshopping, that they really do scale the tallest and most iconic structures in the world, there is a discomfiting artificiality to the storytelling.
Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus are Russians who were both captivated by the idea of “rooftoping,” an international fad along the lines of the 1920s flagpole sitters, only hundreds of feet higher, with an infinitely larger audience, and immeasurably more dangerous. Unlike the legendary comment made by George Leigh Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb then-unconquered Mount Everest, “Because it’s there,” the rooftoppers want to climb to the top of skyscrapers to be seen.
It opens with brief 2019 scenes showing Nikolau and Beerkus preparing to climb to the top of the spire of the one of the tallest buildings in the world: the then-almost-completed 2,227 feet tall Merdeka 118 in Malaysia, soon to be featured in an MCU film (“Thunderbolts”). Then we get some backstory on the couple before they met and the literal and romantic ups and downs of their relationship.
Nikolau grew up in a circus family. She loved watching her aerialist parents perform together on a flying trapeze. But her father left for another woman and her mother never recovered. Nikolau was raised by her grandmother and promised herself she would never depend on anyone again. But she struggled to decide on a direction for her life until she began to see the rooftoppers on Instagram. They were all men. She knew what she was made for. “Seeing their passion, their freedom, was magical. They take crazy risks to feel their potential…. I knew I had found my performance. This is my trapeze.”
She wanted to outdo the men by climbing higher and more dangerous structures and she wanted to perform for her social media audience by wearing striking costumes (high heels!) and in gymnastic poses requiring supreme balance and flexibility. Now might be a good time to point out that Nikolau is exceptionally pretty.
Beerkus loved the exhilaration of the climb. He tells us the higher he climbed, the more he could breathe. He had the largest number of Instagram followers in Russia. And it was on Instagram where he first saw Nikolau. He was captivated by her posts and invited her to accompany him on a sponsored trip to China to climb the highest construction site in the world. They first met en route. And as soon as the pictures are online, Nikolau gets hundreds of thousands of new followers and some sponsorship offers. What could be a better path to true love?
There’s a rom-com style flutter of clips: they’re in a bubble bath together, they’re dancing, they’re snacking on street food. We see them climbing, posting, and getting thrown in jail. We also see them almost-casually noting that one of their fellow rooftoppers has fallen to his death. But what have they learned from this? Not that maybe this is dangerous and will inspire others to risk their lives. Not that maybe huge world events like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the pandemic are about more than interfering with their social media posts and their rebranding of rooftopping as skywalking. The film would have been much more interesting if they went behind the scenes to show us where all this footage is coming from, especially footage of some very private conversations, and if it engaged with the problem of encouraging copycats who may not be as adept – or as lucky – as this couple.
They are much more upset about losing sponsors than than other rooftoppers losing lives. What they tell us they learn is how to do a better job of staying out of trouble, including dressing like construction workers, covering the lenses of security cameras, bringing bolt-cutters, and planning a climb in the midst of the World Cup, when no one will be paying attention.
It isn’t just the climbers who are nonchalant about the lethal consequences of these stunts: it’s also the filmmakers, merrily accompanying the 30+ hour climb at the end of the film with a jaunty, breezy tune on the soundtrack. The climbs are real, if performative. But the movie itself feels as real as astroturf, with the couple relentlessly reiterating the issue of trust and the willingness to rely on others and ham-handed metaphors about how for trapeze artists the “catcher” (strong man) is less flashy but more important than the “flyer.” One interaction with a Ukrainian refugee who is a circus clown feels almost authentic for a moment, but clearly Nikolau has no idea that she comes across as completely self-centered. Clearly, Zimbalist (a sometime rooftopper) and his co-director Maria Bukhonina have no sense that this movie comes across as manufactured as Photoshop.
