Like the subject of his Peter Hujar’s Day, Ira Sachs is an artist whose work is defined by intense intimacy, and with his latest, he turns a seemingly routine conversation into a warm, compassionate, entrancing story that locates the momentous in the mundane.
Built wholly around photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) recounting the events of his prior day to friend and writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), the Passages writer/director’s 75-minute feature is quiet and contemplative, capturing a potent sense of its highly particular time and place, and speaking to grand issues of love, loss, art, purpose, memory, and the ephemerality of existence. It’s a film about the unremarkable that’s anything but.
Peter Hujar’s Day (November 7, in theaters) is based on Rosenkrantz’s book of the same name, which reprints a Dec. 19, 1974, interview she conducted with Hujar in which he related, in exacting detail, the events of his previous 24 hours. Rosenkrantz planned to publish this chat alongside others, but that project fell through and the audio recording of her Hujar one-on-one was lost; only in 2019 was a transcript discovered among the Hujar archives at New York City’s Morgan Library.
Sachs’ script sticks rigorously to that source material, and his action (so to speak) involves nothing more than Hujar delivering, in his Manhattan apartment at 2nd Avenue and 12th Street, a chronological account of his morning, noon, and night.
Shot by cinematographer Alex Ashe on 16mm, Peter Hujar’s Day begins at the beginning, with Hujar—sans introduction, aside from text cards establishing the basic scenario—discussing how he slept through his alarm, was called by an editor at Elle who was scheduled to drop by to pick up photographs of Lauren Hutton, and spoke on the phone to close friend Susan Sontag. Hujar’s note that Sontag ended their call with “big kiss” and, then, “darling,” is the type of small, amusing aside that gives this trip back in time its richness.
Because Sachs doesn’t add to Rosenkrantz’s original record, the stream of names that Hujar drops proves somewhat bewildering, albeit in an inviting manner; it’s as if one is swimming in someone else’s recollections, making sense of the who, what, when, where, and why on the fly.
Peter Hujar’s Day is about the quotidian, as well as derives its meaning from it—although that’s not initially apparent as Hujar relays that the Elle editor, in a long cape, was “very French” and “not arty, but sorta almost,” and that he tallied up what was he set to earn from the sold pics.
Money is a recurring point of interest for Hujar, who’s not shy about wanting to be both well-known and financially successful, and Whishaw so fully inhabits the soft-spoken character (whose eyes are frequently downcast) that he comes across not like a compendium of writerly ticks and traits but a uniquely complicated individual: social and yet constantly craving solitude and naps; talkative and yet understated; open-minded and yet judgmental; and revealing and yet subtly cagey about the lengths to which he wants to expose himself.
The brunt of Hujar’s preceding day, it turns out, was spent on a mission to photograph Allen Ginsberg for The New York Times, and Hujar tells this tale with rigorous descriptiveness, be it regarding the icon’s apartment (with its tenement furniture, linoleum, “few Indian things,” Bob Dylan wall poster, and scattered guitars) or his constant chanting as they ventured into the city for the shoot.
With intermittent exceptions, Rosenkrantz is merely a silent witness to an extended soliloquy that Hujar peforms in a “And I said…and he said….and I said…” manner that boasts its own ordinary sort of poetic rhythm. All the while, Hujar and Rosenkrantz move about his two-floor residence, gravitating from kitchen to bedroom to dining room, where they briefly dance to an LP of Tennessee Jim’s rockabilly ditty “Hold Me Tight.”
“I often have a feeling that in my day, nothing much happens. That I’ve wasted it,” says Hujar, to which Rosenkrantz responds that her motivation for this undertaking is a gnawing feeling that she doesn’t do much of anything. Peter Hujar’s Day’s linear collection of humdrum anecdotes, however, suggests that life is, at heart, comprised of these very run-of-the-mill talks, chores, meet-ups, meals, worries, fears, hopes, and plans.
Sachs’ film wrings inspiration from the everyday, the titanic from the trivial. Underscoring that point are two brief breaks in the proceedings in which portraits of Hujar and Rosenkrantz are set to operatic music, and which include both characters briefly staring directly at the screen—self-conscious gestures in tune with an opening moment that italicizes the movie’s inherent artificiality.
Peter Hujar’s Day is up-close-and-personal. Still, there’s also a detached quality to it that’s echoed by Hujar’s mounting far-sightedness, which requires him to look at photos from a distance. Rosenkrantz’s reply that when you take a step back, “it all hangs together,” feels like a direct comment about Sachs’s film, whose heaviness grows as the sun sets and Rosenkrantz expresses concern (not for the first time) about Hujar’s unhealthy eating habits and the chain-smoking he himself confesses leaves him with “smoker’s hangover all day long.”
Given that Hujar passed away in 1987 before achieving real fame, death and irrelevance hover over the film. So too does an impression of everything being lost—not just great works of art and vibrant eras, but the minutia that fills up our waking hours, whether it’s an apartment’s heat going on and off like clockwork, or the chitchat of streetwalkers overheard from an upper-floor window in the wee hours of the morning.
Akin to reading an entry in the diary of a member of New York’s 1970s art world, Peter Hujar’s Day is rife with references to some of the period’s luminaries and offers an amusing and personal peek at the inner workings of a bygone queer cultural scene. More than that, however, it’s a self-reflexive rumination on the way in which our experiences (and selves) are shaped by the littlest of things, even though they’re destined to fade away—in immediate importance, and our memories—long before we do.
Sachs’ film finds beauty in that inevitable, sorrowful reality, and with Whishaw as a captivating figure of introspection and reserve, it turns a single conversation into the stuff of poignant drama.
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