Peter Hujar's Day Review: Ira Sachs' Drama Is A Portrait Of Rare Intimacy & One Of The Year's Best Acted Films

“I often have the feeling that in my day, nothing much happens… and I’ve wasted it.” So muses photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) midway through his recorded conversation with his friend, the writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall). Linda has solicited Hujar’s participation in the development of an unconventional new book, where artists relay, in meticulous detail, their previous day. Rosenkrantz, who is still alive, was planning a project of deceptive simplicity. A work of non-fiction detective work, if you will. As an artist herself, Rosenkrantz wondered if she was doing nothing with her day, too, or whether there was something in the nothing — a fantastical in the quotidian.

The book was never realized in its entirety, and the recording of her interview with Hujar was lost, but the transcript was found in 2019. Director Ira Sachs, whose work is a perpetual investigation into the innocuousness of day-to-day communication, has taken that transcript and physicalized it in a quietly magical reconstruction. Peter Hujar’s Day centers the seams of production, beginning with Whishaw obstructed by a clapperboard, and later by a boom operator adjusting the audio. The film is at once a project of verisimilitude and a meditation on the ways reality gets fictionalized as soon as it travels from memory to oration.

The real-life Hujar was an exceptional talent. One of the most prominent members of the New York underground art scene of the 1970s and 80s, his unabashed portraits were a boon for the status of American photography as well as for the burgeoning gay rights movement. At the point of his interview with Rosenkrantz, he had been involved with Andy Warhol’s famed Screen Tests and shot the first gay liberation march in 1970. He would eventually publish a book of portraits with subjects ranging from literary pioneer William S. Burroughs to fellow photographer Susan Sontag.

Some of that filters into the re-imagined conversation between Hujar and Rosenkrantz, but much of it is also charmingly mundane. Conversation drifts from Hujar’s extensive dealings with beat poet Allen Ginsburg (who was vehemently antagonistic to the idea of being shot in portrait) to the ordering of Chinese food. Sachs tells us this is a film, and so it is, the appearance and the audio of a seemingly normal day abstracted by the apparatus. In this way, the film reveals the extraordinary within the ordinary.

Through Recreation, Sachs Suggests The Interchangeability Of Fiction & Non-Fiction

Except, of course, that there is no such thing as ordinary, not really, when the subject is who it is. His dealings are of a higher plane. As he relates it, Hujar’s day begins with a bizarre interaction with an editor at Elle Magazine, whom he later surmises may have just been pretending to be so and may have just been a rabid fan of the model Lauren Hutton, whom Hujar had photographed. From there, Hujar spent the bulk of the day with Ginsburg, whom he had been commissioned to photograph by the New York Times. And from there back home to develop his film. But in these conversations, Hujar also brings up the likes of Fran Lebowitz, Richard Avedon, Maurice Hogenboom,Tuli Kupferberg, and many other exceptional talents, as one would bring up a trip to the supermarket.

As Hujar says in the aforementioned quote, he had assumed that would be all to his day. But when he got to recalling it in as fine a detail as possible, so much more came out. The observations of the everyday get expanded into works of incalculable inspiration. For the most talented and free in our artistic canon, as Hujar most certainly was, little moments become large revelations. Through it all, Hujar muses on his sexuality, his process of “seeing” the photograph as he develops in the dark room, his complicated disdain for celebrity as a structure, and his frustration with creation within the confines of capitalism.

Seductively shot on grainy film by Alex Ashe (a photographer himself), the film is cinematic by way of instruction. His is a slow-moving camera that captures these deceptively small interactions with tenderness. Like a living document, or a moving still life, Peter Hujar’s Day unfolds with the distinct texture of a coffee date that spills, unexpectedly, into the late evening. Hujar and Rosenkrantz were not lovers, but the film has a rare, sensual intimacy.

Obviously, a huge part of that intimacy is communicated through the transcript’s unchanged dialogue, but it is also handled with remarkable aplomb by Whishaw. The actor’s singular vulnerability is once again on display here, as he lovingly animates an artist who previously only existed through otherwise staid words on a page. Hall’s job is a bit more thankless considering much of her work is to simply sit and respond, but it is to her credit that we learn just as much about Rosenkrantz as we do Hujar, so much written on her face.

Because the transcript likely did not indicate the passage of time or what might have taken place during necessary breaks, Sachs has the two jump around from place to place within the confines of this cozy apartment. Here, they crack nuts and munch on cheese. Now, they’re on the rooftop looking out at New York City. The film feels unexpectedly mournful, bringing to life a time that does not exist anymore. The ability to sit and wonder aloud with a friend has been removed by so much technological advancement. So, too, has the permission to gab about the artistic process. Sachs gives us several gifts through this uniquely beautiful movie: a space to reflect, a time to pause, and, indeed, to give us Peter Hujar’s Day. What a day it was.