Bet you he slept in the next day, after all that excitement
dir: Ira Sachs
2025
This could be, I imagine, one of the most boring films that 2025 conjured, for certain people.
Let’s be honest, for most people. I don’t think most people, most humans, though not most people who love film, would have the time or the inclination to watch a flick like this. They would have far more entertaining things to do with their lives and their time, which could include anything from whacking cane toads, to counting trains to even jogging.
But for weird people (like me), who make decisions on what to watch based on what films esteemed film critics like Richard Brody of The New Yorker nominate in their best of end of year lists, you would come along to a film like this primed, ready to be fascinated and entertained.
And of course it helps that the film stars two people, both accomplished actors, both dream boats in their own ways. If you love Ben Whishaw, then this flick would be like crack to you: It’s 70 or so minutes of him talking talking talking endlessly and smoking. It further helps if you think Rebecca Hall is the bee’s knees too, which I do. She’s a great actor and an accomplished director as well.
The other criteria for possibly enjoying something like this is that it helps if you’re a bit of an art wanker, or whether you’re art wanker adjacent. I’m not going to pretend I knew who either Linda Rosenkrantz or Peter Hujar were back in the day or before watching this flick, and I’m not going to pretend I’ve learned that much about them, but they namedrop Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, Warhol and Allen Ginsburg, and I know all of them, so I get some of the milieu they were swimming around in, back in December of 1974.
1974! That long ago? That’s like… 52 years ago! Wow, imagine if someone was, like, born in 1974? They’d be ancient! I feel like disintegrating into dust and flying away in the wind right now, but anyway…
People back then were very different, mostly because of a profound lack of technology. They didn’t fill their days with endless doomscrolling, or with posting movie reviews on websites, or shopping for furry costumes online.
They called people. On telephones. And talked to them. They smoked cigarettes, and talked face to face with people. They left their domiciles and travelled to other buildings in order to photograph people, or record them talking about themselves on tape recorders.
Sounds like the Middle Ages or something.
Artist Linda Rosenkrantz gets the idea to interview artist friends she knows in order to capture every detail of a given day of their artistic lives. She interviews her friend Peter (Whishaw), as he relates to her every single thing he did, every thought he had, every lie he said or thought of, every element of every task he performed on that particular day, being the previous day.
It takes a day and a night for them, for Peter and Linda, as he gushes and she coaxes until everything is captured. Both actors are Brits, and both pretend to be Americans, and they do a pretty good job, Ben especially, who has to talk non-stop. The script they’re working on is based on a transcript of the recording from way back then, will no variation from what was captured. But what seems to have been captured is naturalistic chatter, not scripted dialogue. At least it doesn’t sound like scripted dialogue per se. It’s how a photographer would chatter with his other friend in the scene, but unnaturally just describing everything he remembers.
It doesn’t feel like you’re watching a scripted drama. It feels like you’re listening in on, eavesdropping, on two friends chatting. That’s a challenge, for an audience. It’s a challenge for the performers, but the really hardship is ours.
Their difficulty is choosing how to give life, give energy to what otherwise could sound like someone reading out a catalogue or a phone directory. “I did this, I did that” can sound as lifeless and dull as someone telling you about the dream they had the other night. I mean sometimes people say some extraordinary stuff (especially if you were in their dream), but usually it’s like “and then the cat was wearing a hat, and told me to eat some chalk, and we were in an Uber, but then we were on a surfboard and then…”
Ben Whishaw is literally an actor who I would watch and listen to with avid attention if he were to read anything out. The menu from a Chinese restaurant. I don’t care if it’s a receipt from Marks and Spencer, or the manual instructions from a Canon laserjet printer / photocopier / fax machine, or a list of people he still has the shits with because they wronged him in high school. I have and will again listen to him reading poetry, honest to God, poetry, of Seamus Heaney, of Keats, of WH Auden.
He is the voice of Paddington, for Christ’s sake.
Playing Peter Hujar should be easier for him than drawing breath. I mean, almost none of us know who he was or what he was like, so we have nothing to expect, and that’s fine, that means he can create this character for us to his own specifications.
And I guess we learn a lot about this man, who sadly died in the mid 80s during the start of the AIDS epidemic. He was a respected photographer, but not someone acclaimed in his day like Mapplethorpe or Warhol (despite being peers with them). He was quite meticulous about his work, about the processes of his work, about the fiddliest parts of it. Like most freelancers he was constantly chasing payments owed to him for his photos. He photographed anyone that asked but also would be commissioned by the New York Times or Vogue and the other big gigs of the day.
That his job on that day entailed photographing Allen Ginsburg for the NYT, and what a prick the guy was to work with, and yet he’s debating in his head and thus aloud a day later with Linda how great it would be to have photos of Ginsburg and William S. Burroughs for a book he might put out of his work, and would Susan (Sontag) do the intro, ya think?
He seemed to not be complacent about his work, to always question if it could have been better, if he needed to get the subject to like him more in order to get a better portrait of them, how best to reveal something, anything powerful about that person.
If you were, like myself, a person adjacent to the art world, but neither beholden to it nor immune / inured to it, you could find these ruminations fascinating. I did, I do, I still do the more I think about it, but this is fairly niche stuff unless you’re a person who’s curious about the creative process. People who talk like this about stuff like this invariably come across as wankers to those outside of this rarefied bubble, so it’s maybe not for everyone, or even for anyone. But I can’t imagine there was anyone, clod or otherwise, looking up at the cinema’s marquee, maybe with their mouth hanging open, genuinely confused as to whether they should watch a) a movie with The Rock in it, b) the next Avatar: Blood ‘n Guts ‘n Grease Off the Rod, or Peter Hujar’s Day.
This is like a film teachers would take their English Lit class to as a punishment. No, that’s not fair, but there wouldn’t be an awake teenager in sight after 15 minutes. What are these long conversations people are happening without emojis or contractions lol? Who are these old people talking about, other old people? What’s a photographer? Everyone takes photos with their phone, boomer, next you’ll be making fire with sticks and telling us about phone booths.
The way that the film is put together is somewhat strange, in that the artifice of what is happening is not hidden from us entirely: there are set up shots, sometimes we see the crew; the clothes change without rhyme or reason, just to remind us that it’s being filmed on different days even though to the characters it’s all the same day. And there’s a couple of moments where the actors freeze, or deliberately pose themselves as models being photographed, by someone like Peter or Richard Avedon or the like, in some impeccably stylised fashion shoot. And of course Ben and Rebecca would look amazing, because they’re both so thin and beautiful (sigh).
They are both so into it, into realising this strange vision, they’re both amazing. A two person play through which though they talk constantly about a whole bunch of people we’ll never meet, and yet it’s like they’re the only two living people in New York, despite the fact that we can always hear the hum of the city in the background. Sitting, standing, lying down, cradling each other, lying in each other’s laps like housecats or leaning on each other’s shoulders, the better to get the whole story with.
Ira Sachs is a wonderful director, and he’s done films I’ve loved (Love is Strange), and flicks I haven’t as much (last year’s Passages, even though it had Ben as one of the leads, it’s just that he had such a prick of a co-star), but I can always rely on his work to be that of a fascinated observer, rather than someone who’s making “product” or “content”. He, too, is clearly fascinated by the creative / artistic process, and this film definitely bears that out.
7 ways in which today was a good day out of 10
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“I often have a feeling that in my day nothing much happens. That I've wasted another day.” – not today, Satan, not today - Peter Hujar’s Day
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