‘Peter Hujar’s Day’ Review: Ira Sachs’ Magnificent Two-Hander Is Like a Documentary on Its Two Great Actors, Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall
Ben Whishaw again proves himself as the brilliant actor we all knew he was, if we were looking closely enough, in Ira Sachs’ “Peter Hujar’s Day.” The film, set in 1974 New York City, is an intimate two-hander starring just Whishaw and Rebecca Hall as gay photographer Peter Hujar and writer Linda Rosenkrantz, respectively. They gathered, it’s true, on a cold day in December, where Hujar recounts all the events of the previous one, which involved photo opportunities with Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, and a lot of quotidian nothingness. But those small moments of a day grow profound as Peter’s winding monologue wears on. Writer/director Sachs’ extraordinary new movie never breaks from the pair, and at times becomes like a documentary about the greatness of the actors themselves, Mozart possessing the soundtrack as Sachs and cinematographer Alex Ashe take longing, lingering B-roll of the performers.
Essentially a monologue that wouldn’t be out of place on a stage, “Peter Hujar’s Day” makes the case that every moment of our lives, no matter how mundane, has value. Peter’s (Whishaw) recounting of 24 hours of his own life opens a window into the art milieu of 1970s New York, over half a decade out from AIDS killing off most of its purveyors and practitioners. The film is a lolling, ruminating afternoon bathed in sunlight and plaintive reflection as Peter vividly recalls interactions with names that will be familiar to you, like Susan Sontag, and other intellectuals and creators of the period. There’s a discursive ramble about ordering Chinese food that takes on a strange power.
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There is no plot to speak of in this delicately directed film that somehow does acquire suspense as Peter works out the kinks of his yesterday, Rebecca Hall as Rosenkrantz in a fabulous red smock, cigarettes and booze freely flowing everywhere. Sachs previously directed Whishaw to one of his best turns in “Passages,” the anguished love triangle that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023. His camera is obsessed with these actors and their beauty, the only ways to mark the passage of a day’s time being the subtle outfit changes of the characters.
Here is a test of how a director can mine brilliance out of a single location, with only two actors. Production designer Stephen Phelps relishes in the austere minimalism of Linda’s 94th-street apartment, with editor Affonso Gon?alves elegantly chiseling the movie down to a lean under-75 minutes. Hall occasionally provides gay-bestie commentary as Peter Hujar runs through the smallest events of his prior day, and it’s obvious how these actors had an immediate chemistry on set, Sachs directly closely but also just letting the camera go. Working from a book that’s word-for-word the transcript of Peter Hujar’s retellings, the film finds sly poetry in the everyday. Whishaw is the right curious subject to make a film that appears to study him, chainsmoking and drinking in a turtleneck.
How does a transcript of a conversation become a movie? Sachs is searchingly in pursuit of the answer to that question, but what he has captured here is oddly wrenching and moving. “Peter Hujar’s Day” has the feel of a late-night conversation where you’ve revealed too much to one of the people closest to you. The film keeps us confined to Linda’s apartment, only occasionally breaking to bring us out onto the roof, the New York City afternoon (and eventually nighttime) backdrop a soothing balm to claustrophobia. Sachs is eavesdropping into profundity, perhaps Peter’s darkest revelation being the “smoker’s hangover” he has from constantly having cigarettes in his mouth. But better not stop now.
Sachs, the director of heart-hurting movies like his very personal “Keep the Lights On” and the late-in-life gay romance “Love Is Strange,” is interested in the semiotics of acting but never skimps on the actual emotions produced in the process. When the “Peter Hujar’s Day” ends, you feel winded by a day spent. British actor Whishaw is best known for voicing Paddington and for quietly chaotic psychosexual work in films like “Perfume” and, of course, Sachs’ “Passages” (where he gives a bruising monologue to his now-ex-boyfriend, warning him to not come closer or else, at that film’s end). But here he gets a monumental showcase and, honestly, a feat of memorization as Peter’s narration unspools, Hall closing in with her tape recorder and an eager ear.
Sachs is one of the great ethnographers of human emotions in crisis. Here, he’s working at a more calm register, no exploding love triangles or toxic relationships in view. The movie calls direct attention to its own artifice, starting with a clapboard on screen that reminds us that what we are watching is a construction. Whishaw’s monologue gets increasingly emotional toward the film’s end, though “Peter Hujar’s Day” never veers from its source material into something puffed-up and melodramatic. This is a movie you want to live inside. It’s Sachs’ least commercial offering in a filmography that’s always challenging, yearning, and obsessed with its actors, whether Isabelle Huppert in “Frankie” or John Lithgow in “Love Is Strange.” Sachs has found an impeccably in-sync collaborator in Ben Whishaw that he should not let go of any time soon.
Grade: A-
“Peter Hujar’s Day” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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