PETER HUJAR'S DAY is an odd fish of a film that offers a fascinating glimpse into what life must have been like at the heart of the bohemian, queer arts scene in late 70s New York, before woefully outstaying its welcome.
It stars Ben Whishaw as the titular real-life queer activist and portrait photographer Peter Hujar. We spend the entire hour and a quarter in his stunning New York apartment (imagine enjoying THAT on a magazine salary now!) as he relates what happened to him the day before to his friend and writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall). To be fair, this minute detail contains a lot of delicious gossip about iconic writers - not least Fran Lebowitz, Susan Sontag and Allen Ginsberg. But the minute detail and almost deadpan tone bely the emotion of what Peter is actually experiencing. Ginsberg, for example, is wildly, offensively, inappropriate. But we don't really see or feel what Hujar's response is to this. Maybe that's because the film is based on a transcript of the real-life version of this interview that was recently uncovered in the Morgan Library. It's not so much a scripted drama as a recreation of an admittedly and deliberately mundane retelling of the day in the life of a jobbing photographer. The problem is we never see or feel the importance of his art.
That said, there is a tug back into emotional response at the end of the film. It's scored with the Mozart Requiem and cuts to white. Those of us who know anything about Hujar realise that this is the heyday of that beautiful moment of queer expression and activism in New York. The AIDS crisis was around the corner of the 1980s and would claim Hujar as a victim, iconically photographed on his deathbed. None of that is in THIS film, to be clear. But for those of use who know, it adds some poignancy to Whishaw's final scenes.
PETER HUJAR'S DAY played Sundance, Berlin and London 2025. It has a running time of 76 minutes. It was released in the USA in November and will be released in the UK on Jan 2nd.
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