Artists, collaborators and married couple Christo and Jeanne-Claude always made projects on a massive scale. With iconic installations like The Gates in New York City’s Central Park in 2005 or wrapping Berlin’s Reichstag in white fabric in 1995, the couple realized 23 large-scale projects with another 47 conceived but never approved to build. After Jeanne-Claude’s death in late 2009, Christo was forced to go on alone and in 2016, he brought to life The Floating Piers, a series of golden walkways on Italy’s Lake Iseo at the foot of the Alps. Director Andrey M. Paounov’s new documentary, Walking on Water, details how that project came to life.
When we first meet Christo, he’s working silent and alone in his studio creating concept art for the eventual project. As he later explains to a group of New York City school children, he and Jeanne-Claude made many attempts to do something similar in different locations since the ‘70s, but never received approval to build them. Given that, we assume completing this project is in some way about Christo creating the ultimate tribute to his wife, but Paounov’s film is never that explicit—either about the motivations for the project or why he’s showing the audience what they’re seeing in any given scene. Instead, outside of a few title cards, he forces the audience to pick up vital information naturally as Christo and the people helping him create The Floating Piers work.
Though it’s easy to pick up important details like that the project’s path covered roughly 3 km of water and 1.5 km of land or that it ran from June 18 to July 3, 2016, by not being clearer in his intent, Paounov’s film can occasionally leave the viewer feeling a bit adrift. We see Christo and crew go to Vatican City to give Pope Francis a piece in support of his African charities, but we see nothing about why he decided to do the work or what he wants it to mean. Instead, we see him say something vague about how even this small piece involves architecture before he repeats the same sales pitch for The Floating Piers we’ve heard him give a dozen times by this point.
Still, as incomplete as that scene is, it’s at least about Christo’s art, far more frustrating are the multiple scenes we see of Christo struggling with technology. In an early Skype call with the project’s Operations Manager, Vladimir Yavachev and others, the scene goes from smiles to Christo and Yavachec literally screaming at each other while everyone else grimaces in the background. We’re left to assume Paounov leaves these scenes in to emphasize how anti-technology Christo is and how easily he can become angry, but after watching that same pattern so many times, the choice has the presumably unintended effect of making Christo seem like an irrational fool whom everyone struggles to handle.
Though that technique is merely annoying, there are times when Paounov’s more circumspect approach to storytelling hurts the documentary. In a scene where Yavachev and Christo attend a planning meeting with the Brescian local government, rather than allow the audience to actually hear the details, Paounov leaves the dialogue untranslated, instead layering multiple people on top of each in the soundtrack over images of both Yavachev and Christo struggling not to fall asleep. While the scene cleverly relays the boredom and bureaucracy of planning the work, it also leaves the audience too in the dark on what producing the project involves and misses an opportunity to lay the groundwork for the logistical nightmares that eventually become the film’s meat.
Indeed, the film is at its best when it finally focuses on the issues both big and small that make the project so difficult to complete. The film’s most engrossing sequence comes in the final days before the piers are set to open. Thanks to days of consecutive storms, the crew worries they’ll have to delay the opening because the weather will keep them from attaching the golden fabric to the plastic platforms. However, as one of the crew notes, the weather typically follows a pattern of sunny in the mornings and stormy in the evenings. So, when Paounov smash cuts to clear, sunny skies the next morning, every moment that follows feels like a race against time. By the time the sky has darkened with clouds and Christo is yelling at the crew not to keep opening the helicoptered-in bags of fabric before they’re ready to be clipped in, all that thrilling elation has been literally and figuratively dampened by the realities of nature. It’s an exciting sequence and one that makes the eventual opening that much more cathartic and meaningful.
Walking in Water is not so much a portrait of an artist as of a single project. However, those who come to Paounov’s film looking for a better understanding of how The Floating Piers came to life will still be left wanting more. That said, the images of the final work and the building process are so beautiful, they speak for themselves and it’s perhaps right that Paounov doesn’t try to psychoanalyze his subject. Christo and Jeanne-Claude have always been adamant that their work’s meaning comes purely from its aesthetic. Perhaps it’s more than just coincidence that The Floating Piers share the same vista as the Mona Lisa.
