There\u2019s a perverse intrigue in reading someone else\u2019s diary. The daily thoughts and routines of another prove infinitely fertile for reflection: In what ways are they more well-adjusted, unexpectedly banal, or stark raving mad compared to ourselves? Through relating or refracting similarities and differences, a broader understanding of our own personhood can be achieved while also fostering an appreciation (or, depending on how unhinged the content, newfound disgust) for the idiosyncratic interiority of a fellow human being. While not a straightforward diary entry, the daily activities, anecdotes, and musings of a cultural icon are just as scintillating\u2014and almost as intrusive to behold\u2014in Peter Hujar\u2019s Day.<\/p>\n
Indie stalwart Ira Sachs (Passages<\/a>) focuses on the titular New York City photographer (Ben Whishaw) as he recounts a day in his life to writer and close friend Linda Rosenkratz (a fine-tuned Rebecca Hall), herself an established art world luminary. It is December 19, 1974 when Rosenkrantz invites Hujar to her impeccably curated apartment on 94th Street in Manhattan. The purpose of this specific encounter is for Hujar to pore over every detail (nothing is too insignificant, meaning that stray ruminations abound) of what he did the day prior, which Rosenkrantz would record on tape and then transcribe. The aim was to publish a book containing a series of these \u201cday in the life\u201d artistic portraits, but that never quite manifested.\u00a0<\/p>\n In fact, Sachs\u2019 film wouldn\u2019t exist if this very transcript wasn\u2019t rediscovered and subsequently published as Peter Hujar\u2019s Day in 2021. Yet when he gave his rambling summary of what occurred to him on December 18, Hujar himself was hardly considered on the same level of many of his contemporaries, among them Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe<\/a> (David Wojnarowicz would also become his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 some years later in the early \u201980s). He was a struggling artist, who had previously attained a Fulbright scholarship and commercial photography gigs before deciding to solely pursue his own projects. John Waters, Susan Sontag, Fran Liebowitz, and William S. Burroughs all posed for him, but it wasn\u2019t until after Hujar\u2019s AIDS-related death in 1987 that he began to accrue widespread acclaim\u2014an ironic artistic clich\u00e9 for a true visionary.\u00a0<\/p>\n Upon the publication of Peter Hujar\u2019s Day, fellow subcultural photographer Nan Goldin<\/a> wrote<\/a>: \u201cRead it and weep if you didn\u2019t know him. Or read it and weep if you did that we lost him.\u201d The same can be said of Sachs\u2019 film. Though the previously mentioned 20th century cultural icons of gay New York are perhaps more recognizable, this film intimately aligns its audience with his process, personality, and pesky vices through Whishaw\u2019s indelible performance\u2014which is among his best, if only for the intense attention to the artist\u2019s New Jersey-bred, NYC-inflected accent. No matter how familiar you might be with Hujar\u2019s singular oeuvre, Whishaw will endear you to him as if you\u2019re the one he\u2019s ranting at, blowing cigarette smoke in the direction of, or, sometimes, just simply sitting in silence with.\u00a0<\/p>\n Passages director Ira Sachs calls NC-17 rating “a form of cultural censorship”<\/a>Isabelle Huppert leads a packed ensemble in Ira Sachs\u2019 mild Euro gabfest Frankie<\/a><\/p>\n