***/****
starring Ben Whishaw, Rebecca Hall
screenplay by Ira Sachs, based on the book Peter Hujar’s Day by Linda Rosenkrantz
directed by Ira Sachs
by Angelo Muredda Celebrated New York portrait photographer Peter Hujar becomes the subject of a distinctive portrait himself in Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day, a gentle, minor-key experiment in memorializing the everyday. Anchored by a puckish performance from Ben Whishaw, who spends most of the time platonically seducing his interrogator–Hujar’s friend, author Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall)–and, by extension, the spectator listening in like a fly on the wall, the film lovingly recreates not a day in Hujar’s life but his languid recalling of it the day after.
Hujar and Rosenkrantz’s wispy, barely feature-length dialogue is based, as the tastefully blue typeset opening crawl tells us, on a recently published transcript of an audio recording from December 19, 1974. The conversation was part of a series in which Rosenkrantz asked her luminary contemporaries to recount in detail their activities of the day before, to capture something of how artists observe daily life. For Hujar, that consists at first of puzzling over the feeling of not having done anything of substance with his time, which soon gives way, once he’s warmed up, to banal inventories of hangouts with then-famous people as well as deeper thoughts on how to do good work in photography by taking the time to really look at one’s subject. Mostly, it’s an occasion to quip, humble-brag, smoke, and spend time with his pal, teasing out his plans and ambitions as night falls and the vibes get lazy.
For Sachs, the transcript becomes an opportunity to posthumously reanimate a fellow pioneering queer American artist. More than that theoretical brief, the text offers Sachs a chance to dwell on the passage of time on film. The ebb and flow of the conversation is measured not so much by narrative beats, of which there are precious few apart from the odd excursion to the roof to gaze out over the city. It’s determined largely by the natural light streaming in through the window of Rosenkrantz’s apartment as it plays on the walls and on their faces, and cuts through the ever-present curtain of smoke wafting up from their cigarettes. Sachs’s editorial approach to the transcript consists of pruning rather than editorializing, and he doesn’t dare introduce moments of tension; he’s content with Hujar’s recounting of the micro drama of deciding which coat to wear for a visit with Alan Ginsberg on the Lower East Side. Sachs shows his authorial hand instead in his intimate recreation of the apartment as a specific space occupied by two people in time, drawn as he is to the natural melancholy of the setting sun as the day winds down, its dwindling light replaced by the oversaturated amber glow of lamps and candles painting their faces as the conversation draws to a close.
In its largely hands-off approach to the documentary record–that is, aside from the necessary contrivances of putting its words in the mouths of actors and dressing Rosenkrantz’s cozy apartment to look like the kind of loft a writer might have dwelled in circa 1974, likely well beyond the means of someone in the same position today–the film fits into the tradition of verbatim theatre, a minor companion to texts like Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror, where interviews with real people are performed, interpreted by actors, and put into dialogue. Though part of the appeal of verbatim theatre is undoubtedly listening to real people’s voices bouncing off each other and coming up against the artifice of the theatrical context into which they’ve been transplanted, Peter Hujar’s Day‘s pleasures have more to do with the intimacy of the setting, the warmth given off as the colleagues (and the actors playing them) spend the better part of the day together surrounded by a convincingly curated, period-accurate spread of clocks, table-runners, and throw pillows. A better aesthetic analogy might be the walking simulator video game–sometimes treated more as a derogatory descriptor for a game where nothing happens than as a proper genre–where players do not get into hardcore life-or-death combat situations but spend most of their time traversing landscapes. In its flirtation with tediousness, Peter Hujar’s Day might best be described as a talking simulator, attentive to how Hujar, not physically incorporated in the transcript save for his words but present before Sachs’s camera (as his own subjects were present for his own), slinks about Rosenkrantz’s apartment like a cat, sniffing out photos, delicately shelling pistachios into a bowl, and dangling a cigarette from his hand as he pontificates on books and photo shoots and liverwurst sandwiches.
While Sachs lingers over Whishaw’s limber form as Hujar stands on tables and sprawls on the bed beside Linda as the chat gets more relaxed, there’s no effort here to approximate Hujar’s own stark, vulnerable black-and-white portraits of queer downtown New Yorkers in his social circle. In place of Hujar’s style is a far cozier aesthetic befitting the project’s humbler origins. That approach is ably conveyed by DP Alex Mashe’s texturally-rich 16 mm photography, itself a throwback to the documentary materials of the period, which often yields beautiful images, as when interviewer and subject chat on the rooftop at dusk, lit mostly by the orange glow emanating from the window, as if the apartment is beckoning them back inside. Though the stakes here couldn’t be lower, the effect is often lovely.
