It’s only a matter of time before kids are doing the Peter (Hujar) Pilgrimage: a leisurely photographer’s stroll down New York’s 2nd Avenue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan from 14th to 10th that cuts east across 10th and lands at one of the apartments between Alphabet City’s Avenue C and Avenue D, where – in spirit for us, in the flesh for Hujar – Allen Ginsberg awaits with a relative lack of interest in the scheduled photoshoot that incited the short excursion. That’s the kind of minutiae exhausted in detail in Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day, a literal title for a straightforward film.
Jokes aside, few films this year will likely appeal to the youth or masses less than Peter Hujar’s Day, which is ironic, because it’s stuffed with more style, cool and timeless insight than any movie this year (“I’d be snazzier in a red ski jacket. It’s just more Lower East Side”). But the film’s format is likely to push people away before they ever press play, or deter them early on. It becomes clear within minutes that where we begin is where we’ll be for the duration of the film: in a state of reflection on a day in the life of renowned photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) – 18 December, 1974 to be exact – and only one day, so that it might be unpacked in as great, unimportant and surprisingly significant detail as a day occasionally deserves, if one is appreciating their life in all its beauty, pain and humdrum triviality.
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Sachs lifts nearly every line of dialogue from tapes between Peter Hujar and Linda Rosenkrantz (co-credited screenwriter alongside Sachs), the latter of whom (played by Rebecca Hall) began a project in the 1970s to document on tape the every waking second of her famous friends’ days for an ultimately unfinished book of interviews. The result is fascinating. We sit with the two in a thousand positions around Linda’s New York apartment, the Academy ratio frame usually squared on Peter as he huffs and puffs cigarette after cigarette, recalling things the way one’s mind allows one to: partially, out of order, with infinite corrections, with hyper-personal commentary and with exponentially more memories as the exercise continues.
Hujar is a capsule of contemplative art life in 1970s New York in all of its strange idiosyncrasies, so many of which simply can’t exist in a world with the internet, where answers to what, why, when, where and how people are doing things is not only flooding your feed, but your ad space, work life, social sphere and more. And no one could better Whishaw’s decade-topping performance. The veteran disappears completely into Hujar, akin to Oldman’s Churchill, but in an entirely make-up-less role. It’s that immersive.
In concept and design, Sachs channels The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, with its thick, polar white rug, heavy-gloom atmosphere, mosaicked lounging, chamber setting and never-ending exposition; Kiarostami in its tasteful docudrama-crew reveals; and Warhol in its high-concept simplicity. It’s Sachs’ best film yet.