Sometimes a critic\u2019s insight can only get you so far. This is an experimental slab of \u201cverbatim cinema\u201d \u2014 meaning in this instance that the script has been transcribed from a recorded interview. So I could tell you Peter Hujar\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Whishaw stars as \u2014 or in this case repeats the deadpan words of \u2014 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.<\/p>\n