‘Skywalkers: A Love Story’ is another high-in-the-sky documentary
Following in the daredevil footsteps of 'Man on Wire' and 'Free Solo,' Jeff Zimbalist’s film follows a couple of influencers who operate at great heights.
The route to winning the Best Documentary Feature Oscar, at least in recent years, has entailed either going toe to toe with Vladimir Putin (20 Days in Mariupol, Navalny, and Icarus) or depicting a stunt daredevil operating at great heights (Man on Wire, Free Solo). There’s also the separate category of “kickass archival music documentary” (Summer of Soul), but that’s an outlier.
Skywalkers: A Love Story, which landed this week on Netflix, has a couple of Russian protagonists, and the film touches, very briefly, on their homeland’s invasion of Ukraine. But this one, directed by Jeff Zimbalist along with co-director Maria Bukhonina, is about a young and attractive romantic couple, Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus, who participate in a particular kind of social media influencing.
To paraphrase that old local news bit Bill Hader used to do, “they call it… rooftopping.” Angela and Ivan go to the tops of buildings and other structures, often illegally, and take daredevil photos for their social media audiences. And much like we saw in Free Solo, they’re part of a subculture in which, for obvious reasons, quite a lot of prominent figures have died terrible deaths.
Do you know that social media couple where the guy calls his wife “Pookie”? If the two of them climbed up buildings and scaffolds — and instead of Southern, they were Russian — they would look a lot like this couple.
The film follows the duo as they plan such stunts, including an elaborate piece de resistance where they’re to execute the lift from Dirty Dancing on top of the Merdeka 118 building in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The two have even sometimes been accused of faking their photos, so it’s possible that they agreed to cooperate with the documentary to put such whispers to rest.
They’re certainly compelling subjects, and the documentary gives us a front-row seat to their relationship dynamics and Angela’s occasional anxiety. The visuals are also fantastic, from a combination of the couple’s camera setups and those of the filmmakers. This made me wish, however, that I’d gotten to see it in IMAX, where the film got a brief theatrical release before arriving on Netflix.
This isn’t quite the achievement of Man on Wire or Free Solo. James Marsh’s Man on Wire had a distinct beginning, middle, and end and had no fat; the same is true of its underrated and little-seen fiction adaptation from Robert Zemeckis, The Walk. Free Solo also managed to tell a more interesting story arc about its protagonist.
The director, Zimablist, is the son of the famed baseball economist Andrew Zimbalist. In addition to a long resume in film and television, he directed The Two Escobars, one of the best-ever installments of the 30 for 30 series on ESPN. He also directed the excellent Apple TV+ documentary series about the Super League debacle and the upcoming documentary about Norman Mailer.
Not that there’s anything especially subpar about Skywalkers; when it comes to those who go by the title “influencer,” these people are probably in about the 95th percentile when it comes to being compelling. I don’t expect the film to join its fellow skywalking pictures at the Oscar podium.
Skywalkers: A Love Story is streaming on Netflix.