Yesterday was a day when he actually had nothing, Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) repeatedly says to the writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall). He fell asleep for a short time in between and otherwise spent a lot of time in his darkroom in the development of pictures. Rosenkrantz plans a book project: People from her circle of acquaintances, New York artists and other bohemians, are to hold on to every little thing that you do and that you can do for a day and retire in all details the next morning. As the first partner, she interviews Hujar, an emerging photographer and one of her closest friends. But he initially wanes notes on December 18, 1974. So the next morning he hastily scribbles some scattered memories before leaving Roskrantz's apartment.
The planned book has never occurred and today we probably don't know anything about this day that Peter Hujar experienced over half a century ago, if a transcript of the conversation had not been appeared many years later and published in 2022. This forms the somewhat changed and shortened basis for the only one hour and 16 minutes long “Peter Hujar's Day“By Ira Sachs (” Passages “), who has scored the chat between two life people on an average day in the Upper East Side as a melancholic spectacle and a subtle memory of a past and experience world.
Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) remembers a normal day without special occurrences.
“Usually” this December 18 may only have been for those who witnessed him. Because the New York Downtown scene of that time was full of names that have long since had an almost mythical sound. “Fortunately for all of us,” Rosenkrantz wrote in retrospect later, “his day was perhaps more than usual than usual encounters with people who were considered cultural icons today and came from all circles in which Peter was moving.” Peter visited at lunchtime Hujar, for example, the poet Allen Ginsberg in his apartment on the Lower East Side to take portrait photos of him – his first order for the renowned daily “New York Times”, from which Hujar hoped for a future stable source of money.
But Ginsberg had distrust him, he tells his girlfriend, smugly. His partner Peter Orlovsky opened the door and left it for a long time. You couldn't really call this man, whose head consisted of a disproportionately huge beard and is otherwise hairless. When Hujar told him that he would soon also take pictures of William S. Burroughs, Ginsberg only replied cool that “Bill” had to be bubbled beforehand so that the recordings would go.
Enjoyable mockery
In the almost 76 minutes of “Peter Hujar's Day” there are some names of well -known personalities in the almost 76 minutes. The writer Susan Sontag, for example, in which Hujar tried for a foreword for a future photo band. She only write if she has to or for friends, should have returned on the phone on Sunday. The meeting with a journalist of the French “Elle” magazine, which appears in the morning to pick up some photographs with the Lauren Hutton model, is rather hypothermic.
“She was shorter when I needed to tell you about it,” the photographer Rosenkrantz makes you laugh. The tone between the two is mocking and humorous. Both look at the stars under which they run out of a conscious distance: so far, they have only been included as rapporteurs and observers of their scene, are not yet prominent.
Two great stars
All too willingly, Ben Whishaw (“Limonov: The Balad”) and Rebecca Hall (“Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire”) have a look at this wonderfully moody and sometimes malignant chat, which IRA Sachs on analogous 16mm material Light conditions have structured around a complete day from the morning sunrise to the onset of dusk. The gestures and movements of the two, the mien play and the warm, inclined looks, the film captivates with a detailed precision and love as if every emotion is a huge, dramatic event.
For every story, every detail, Sachs seems to have found the right pose to have found adequate attitude: WHISHAW's head gently put down on Hall's stomach, playing his fingers with her collar. A sequence on the roof of the building, in which both look at the driving waves of the Hudson river, while the sun is slowly towards the horizon. In its emphasized, small -scale form, the concentration on two people talking together in an apartment, “Peter Hujar's Day” is actually a great resolution of a day that ended many years ago, as can only be achieved to the cinema.
Conclusion: In “Peter Hujar's Day” Ira Sachs with Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall pursue a conversation between two artists and, with the help of casual memories of an average of December day in the New York of the 1970s, revives an entire living environment.
We saw “Peter Hujar's Day” as part of the Berlinale 2025, where it is shown in the Panorama section.