Several times, when the conversation at the center of “Peter Hujar’s Day” takes an existential turn, we hear a short passage from Mozart’s Requiem. This quiet and compelling film uses Hujar’s own words, discovered on a transcript at the Morgan Library in New York, to recount the minutiae of a single day in the life of the photographer who died of AIDS complications in 1987.
The transcript is from a tape recording made in 1974 by the nonfiction writer Linda Rosenkrantz, who had planned to include it a book documenting typical ordinary days in the lives of famous and not-so-famous people. Ira Sachs (“Passages,” “Keep the Lights On”) uses Hujar’s words to construct an engrossing two-character film, starring Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, that immerses viewers so deeply in the New York of a half century ago that you can almost smell the exhaust wafting through open windows and garbage rotting in the Hudson River.
Hujar, at the time, was not so famous. He was a successful photographer who focused on the bohemian and queer counterculture and was sufficiently well connected to number the writer Susan Sontag and director Robert Wilson among his circle. The fame he now enjoys developed posthumously, as artists, critics and students of LGBTQ+ history focus on the enormous creative losses of the AIDS pandemic. This includes serious critical reappraisal after a 2018 exhibition at the Morgan, which acquired Hujar’s papers and thousands of contact sheets in 2013. The Mozart references that haunt this haunting film may foreshadow Hujar’s death some 13 years later, long after we see him parsing things like desire, money and ambition — the raw stuff of life — in conversation with an intimate friend.
Or perhaps they are a reminder that every moment, no matter how insignificant, is gone once it has been experienced. Life is a continual dying of the ordinary, unremarkable trivia of being alive. Memory, or recollection, is a gathering up of things that are already dead.
Unlike “My Dinner With Andre,” the 1981 Louis Malle film that also limits itself to a dialogue between two creative people, “Peter Hujar’s Day” doesn’t feel like a constructed text. It isn’t full of well-turned anecdotes, clever rejoinders, or rhetorical peaks and valleys. But Whishaw, who plays Hujar, gives one of the finest accounts of what is called the creative process ever captured on film. Which is to say, he shows rather than tells how there is no dividing creativity from daily existence.
As Whishaw recalls the seemingly meaningless details of Hujar’s day, he is distracted by doubts and reminded of things that need fixing or attending to. These energies surface when they will. Creativity is work, and process, and it infects — or inspirits — life according to its own relentless schedule.
The magic of the film is the intimacy between Whishaw’s Hujar and Hall’s low-key but charming depiction of Rosenkrantz. But there is an even more compelling cinematic intimacy as the conversation plays out in a small apartment, at a dining room table, in the living room, even, for a while, in bed. The two protagonists enjoy the platonic affection and easy candor common to friendships between gay men and straight women. They are close enough that they can talk about anything and nothing at all without boring each other.
Compare this dialogue to diaries written at the same time — for example, the diaries Ned Rorem began publishing in the 1960s — and you experience an intimacy even deeper than the crafted, self-serving confessionals of a writer constructing a persona. Hujar recounts going to the shabby apartment of Allen Ginsberg to photograph the beat poet for the New York Times. When he looks at the contact sheet later in the day, he is disappointed. The images are good enough for the Times, he says, but not good enough for him. Ginsburg was difficult and unpleasant throughout the shoot, and there was no bond between the artist and his subject. Hujar wonders if he failed to attract Ginsburg’s desire.
Self-doubt and self-confidence are precariously balanced and interspersed with chain smoking, takeout lo mein and the observation that Ginsburg bought a persimmon. Hujar is awakened by a phone call, late in the day, and works late into the evening. He goes to sleep only to wake up moments later. He needs to get glasses.
Alex Ashe’s restrained but loving cinematography makes the apartment in which Hujar and Rosenkrantz talk feel like an entire world, and an escape from the world. The dialogue has the unedited feel of cinema verité, but the camerawork isn’t ostentatiously nervous or intrusive. It is a loving frame around a little piece of life, honoring it and holding it up for sustained attention.
Does the film create a historically accurate representation of Hujar, whose artistry transcends the sentimental legacy and platitudes now forming victims of the HIV plague? A silly question. The film honors Hujar not by impersonating him, but by doing exactly what he did in a different medium: demanding we look long and hard at the world.
Unrated. At the AFI Silver Theatre. Contains sexual references and smoking. 76 minutes.
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