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| Rebecca Hall and Ben Whishaw in Peter Hujar's Day |
Cast: Rebecca Hall, Ben Whishaw. Screenplay: Ira Sachs, based on a book by Linda Rosenkranz. Cinematography: Alex Ashe. Art direction: Ryan Scott Fitzgerald. Film editing: Affonso Gonçalves.
Ira Sachs's Peter Hujar's Day lacks everything that people go to movies for: action, conflict, spectacle, laughter, tears, even plot. And yet it's wonderful, a small brilliant gem of a film. It consists of two characters, Linda Rosenkranz (Rebecca Hall) and Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw), talking about what happened on a recent day in Hujar's life, detailing every event he can recall from waking up in the morning to going to sleep at night. The film is based on transcripts of a tape Rosenkranz made of her interview with Hujar, a freelance photographer, for a "day in the life" book. It helps that Hujar moves in circles that include such mid-1970s celebrities as Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, and that he lives in a city like New York, undergoing a constant social upheaval, so what might be an ordinary day for him is more colorful than most of our days. But we never meet these celebrities or see the streets of the city except through Hujar's narrative. What we do see is the confines of Rosenkranz's apartment as Hujar talks and Rosenkranz prods, and the light shifts from day to dusk to night. Cinematographer Alex Ashe's deft use of that light gives the movie what action it possesses beyond the two people moving about the apartment, lying on the couch, talking on the balcony, and Hujar smoking incessantly even as Rosenkranz scolds him for it. Sachs never even lets us see the photos Hujar took, like this one of Ginsberg.
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But Peter Hujar's Day is a small triumph of filmmaking, reliant heavily on the consummate acting skill of Whishaw and Hall.
