Review: Peter Hujar's Day
A glimpse at the world through a photographer's eyes.
Peter Hujar was a gay man who was a celebrated photographer in the 70s and 80s - he died in 1987 as a result of AIDS-related illnesses.
Peter Hujar's Day is directed by Ira Sachs. It stars Ben Whishaw as Hujar. Rebecca Hall plays Linda Rosenkranz - a friend of Hujar's who prompts him to reflect and record how his day has unfolded.
The film is an interesting project. It's a reconstruction of a conversation and Sachs invites the audience to take part in that reconstruction with Brechtian glimpses of behind-the-scenes filmmaking and deliberate visual fragmentation as the story is pieced together.
In writing the screenplay, the source material that Sachs had to work with - as well as Rosenkranz herself - was the transcript of the recording that Rosenkranz had made of her conversation with Hujar. The original recording was lost.
Rebecca Hall is beautiful and provides an effective foil to the dialogue-driven Hujar. Whishaw is outstanding - he inhabits Hujar's stream-of-consciousness thoughts and complex speech-patterns as if they were his own.
What's not particularly clear is why Sachs wanted to make this film and what he's trying to say.
It is the reimagining of a time-capsule, a meditation on life in New York City in the early 70s, a masterclass in name-dropping, and an insight into the trials and tribulations of a photographer who takes his work very seriously.
As a man, the Hujar that emerges on the screen is spiky, dry, detail-driven. We're given glimpses of wry humour, and moments of self-depreciation, but the film is an almost reverential ode to a talented artist - another name in the tsunami of loss as the AIDS pandemic took generations of young men from their friends, families, and lovers.
You probably don't need to get to the cinema to see this - it's the kind of film that makes you want to curl up on the sofa, watching it while smoking cigarettes and drinking whisky, letting the dulcet tones of Ben Whishaw wash over you .
Gareth Johnson
