Sometimes a critic’s insight can only get you so far. This is an experimental slab of “verbatim cinema” — meaning in this instance that the script has been transcribed from a recorded interview. So I could tell you Peter Hujar’s Day is in the modernist tradition of Tolstoy, Joyce and Woolf, where meaning is grounded in the mundane and the sacred is excavated from the banal. Sometimes, however, you want the film to meet you halfway. And this Ben Whishaw effort is simply not in the mood.
Whishaw stars as — or in this case repeats the deadpan words of — the New York photographer Peter Hujar, who was interviewed on December 19, 1974, by the writer Linda Rosenkrantz (here played by Rebecca Hall) and asked to describe, in excruciating detail, the activities of his previous day. The transcripts of that interview were published in 2019 and now the film-maker Ira Sachs (Passages) has seized on them as the source material for this occasionally distracting but mostly wearisome two-hander.
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Whishaw, on camera as Hujar throughout, is depicted in Rosenkrantz’s New York apartment (in pastel-tinged Seventies detail) up against the wall, on the couch, on the bed, on the roof and in the kitchen, and always blabbing monotonously through the transcripts — not quite dialogue and not voiceover either. Hujar’s previous day, we learn, involved taking pictures of Allen Ginsberg, worrying about money, ordering Chinese food, having two naps, fretting about his eyesight and, crucially, eating a sandwich on wheat bread — not just any wheat bread, but the special sprouted wheat bread that he prefers.
No, it’s not supposed to be Avatar: Fire and Ash, although at times it feels twice as long. Verbatim cinema has worked before, most significantly in the case of Clio Barnard’s dark and unsettling 2010 project The Arbor, which depicted the tragic life of the playwright Andrea Dunbar. Yet Barnard’s film had focus and purpose. This is flat, diffuse and underworked. Whishaw and Hall are wasted.
★★☆☆☆
12A, 76min
In cinemas from Jan 2
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