Ben Whishaw at the premiere of “Peter Hujar’s Day” (photo by Robin Marshall / Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Bailey Pennick
The premise is simple enough: 51 years ago, Linda Rosenkrantz was working on a book about her friends’ days — they would talk about their errands and meetings and whatnot, and the chat would be recorded. One of those friends she recorded was photographer Peter Hujar talking about everything he did on December 18, 1974. Within Ira Sachs’ ninth feature film (and ninth project at the Sundance Film Festival) we’re flies on the wall for that conversation in Rosenkrantz’s Manhattan apartment. Taken from surviving transcripts of the day, Sachs’ intimate and thought-provoking film is crafted with only two actors: Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall.
Sachs first encountered this day-in-a-life text within Rosenkrantz’s 2021 book that featured the transcript. He was reading it while making Passages (2023 Sundance Film Festival) in Paris with Whishaw. “I was very moved by the intimacy of this conversation,” says Sachs about the origins of Peter Hujar’s Day during the post-premiere Q&A at The Ray Theatre. “It felt like a great window into a time and also to a friendship, which was really part of what I found so beautiful. And I really thought in a moment, ‘Oh I should make something of this with Ben.’ Like, it was really all in one — there was no one else who I would do it with, and I think Ben and I share an interest in a lot of things, including this history and Peter’s work and people who are trying things differently. So I thought we could take a risk together.”
Whishaw shines within the titular role, rolling monologue after monologue off the tongue with such ease and texture that you’re completely taken in by Hujar describing his Chinese food order and napping schedule in the same rhythm as photographing Allen Ginsberg for The New York Times. While the final result feels effortless, Whishaw confirms that isn’t exactly true. “It was really difficult to learn it,” he laughs about his 55 pages of dialogue. “I showed it to a friend of mine who’s a musician, and she was like ‘This is impossible. This is like trying to learn someone else’s improvisation,’ which is a bit what it was like because it’s not a written thing. I mean, it is written down, but it’s full of all of the kinds of strangenesses of speech of the way people speak. But I found that fascinating to learn, although very difficult!”
Hall as Rosenkrantz is the metronome to Whishaw’s conversational jazz. While having only three pages of dialogue, she’s as captivating as Whishaw, bringing depth to a role that is as outside of Hujar’s mind as we are. Her interjections are full of warmth for her subject, playfully poking at his admissions of fake excuses to get off the phone or their acquaintances in common.
Closer to a two-hander seen on Broadway, the film’s only action is the changing of the light within Rosenkrantz’s apartment. Alex Ashe’s cinematography is masterful, creating mood shifts from apartment window placements, lamp-filled corners, and shadows. Everything in Peter Hujar’s Day is fleeting and shifting, but that’s what makes it so touching. “There’s something very beautiful about the fact that everything gets lost,” says Sachs. “We’re going to get lost, and this moment gets lost. What I’m saying gets lost, and what you’re thinking gets lost, but somehow now this film makes monumental one day.”
