‘A day with Peter Hujar’: requiem for the witness of a vibrant New York | Cinema: premieres and reviews

A day with Peter Hujar, which premieres on the Filmin platform, reproduces an interview conducted in December 1974 by the journalist and writer Linda Rosenkrantz with the famous photographer of the downtown New Yorker Peter Hujar, who died in 1987, aged 53, a victim of AIDS. The interview was framed within a series of meetings for a book that was never finished and in which the author was going to bring together a series of her friends from the art scene at that time, telling in detail what her previous day had been like.

In 2019, Rosenkrantz found the transcript of that meeting, published it in 2022, and now notable filmmaker Ira Sachs has filmed it in a subtle recreation played by Ben Whishaw as Hujar and Rebecca Hall as Rosenkrantz. The result is a surprising chamber piece, a requiem that returns us to the vibrant New York of the seventies and the sensitive and tragic figure of Hujar.

Sachs composes his film in 76 minutes, chronologically, moving his two characters through the spaces of a warm-colored apartment in the West Village: from the living room to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the bedroom, from there to the roof. And all, on a sunny day, around a conversation about which the afternoon is falling and in which there is an incessant drip of proper names, from Susan Sontag to Allen Ginsberg, and from William Burroughs to Bob Wilson or Avedon.

Of the apparent banality in Hujar’s account of his previous day—almost mechanical, cold, in which a photo session with Ginsberg for The New York Times occupies a central place—, something else is emerging among the sound of streets taken over by some of the most influential artists and creators of the late 20th century. Almost all of them dead, like Hujar, whose terrible end was immortalized by his partner, David Wojnarowicz, in a well-known series that captures his last breath.

As in the image that Hujar took of her friend Susan Sontag lying down, the most famous of the writer that exists, or in that disarming snapshot of Candy Darling on her deathbed, Sachs’s film tactfully pursues its own space of intimacy. Lying on a bed, smoking, dancing while the afternoon sun sets, Rebecca Hall and Ben Whishaw, wonderful, enjoy the details of the staging of a singular film, crossed by an inevitable sadness, that of a world that was walking towards its extinction. With the help of Sachs, Hall and Whishaw revive, under the twilight light of that New York, those “portraits of life and death” that made this photographer famous, whose figure we contemplate until we fade away.