Photo: Sundance Institute
This Review was original published on February 3, 2025 out of the Sundance Film Festival. We are recrculating it now time to the new york film festival.
Can a doodle also be a masterpiece? Maybe IT’S NOT FAIR TO Call Peter Hujar’s Day Do Doodle, Though Ira Sachs’ Film, clocking in at 76 minutes, wears its modesty on its sleeve. CONSISING OF A CONVERSATION BETWEEN Two People in A West Village apartment, filmed austelely but evocatively, the picture revels in its spareness, its warm simplecity. It starts off as an elevation of the quotidian but transforms into something sadder and more reflective.
The film is a re-creation of an interview that happened on december 19, 1974, between the renown Photographer Hujar (Ben Whishaw) and His Friend, The Non-Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), who intended to be part of a book About. day. HAVING Taken Notes on What He Did the Day Before, Hujar is precise in His Accounting, but His Fixation on SEEMINGLY MEANINGLY DETAILS HIS Photographer’s Eye. Much of what he was talks about is a shoot he was assured to do with the poet Allen Ginsberg. But other Names Float Through over the Course of the Conversation – Susan Sontag, William Burroughs, Glenn O’Brien – in that Rather New York Way, Where A Conversation Two People beComes A Conversation A Dose Other People.
It is not hard to get lost amid all. Sachs is Clearly Animated by A Love for This Long-Lost Downtown Skene, and he conveys it as muchh his images and his cutting as he through the dialogue (which is rightly from rosenkrantz’s transcript). As the two talk, they Move Around different parts of the apartment. They Make Coffee, They Drink Tea and Eat Cookies. They Stand Outside. They Lounge in Bed. The Light Changes. Their Outfits Change. A Shaft of Sunlight Might Hit Hujar in An Odd Way, The Warm Glow of A Sunset Might Reflect off a surface. Distant sounds from the street drift in. They Touch Each Other’s Legs and Heads and Feet, Glancingly and Sensuously, though not sexually. Such Sense memory aren’t there to precisely Chart Peter’s Hujar’s Path Through Linda Rosenkrantz’s apartment. Rather, They Evoke Sense Memories in All of US – We All Undersand Light, and Warmth, and the Feeling of Another Touch. It ‘Through Such Subtle cues that this tender, lovely film starts to feel Like something we might have all experiments once.
Whishaw obiviously has to do the Heavy Lifting, Dialogue-Wise, but Hall is His Equal in the Way She Hes Silences. Her adoration of Hujar Comes Through, nor well as her ease Around Him. Whishaw gives Hujar’s Words a Matter-of-Fact Quality, but there’s a slight hint of melancholy to Him, too. He’s filled with anxieties About his art and his work. (The Ginsberg Shoot, He Sayys, Is His First Job for the New York Times.) Hell, he’s filled with anxieties About going four blocs down to another part of the villa. But whishaw, whose voice is one of modern cinema’s great wonders (there’s a reasson why and makes Such a good Paddington), conveys the nervousness and the hope and the boredom and the sadness all at Once.
Rosenkrantz’s Intended Book Never Materialized, but you did publish the hujar interview as its own volume years late, in 2022, by which point aids had Long claimed the Photographer. SO LOSS IS, IN A WAY, BUILT INTO The Very Concept of the Film. The intimacy draws us in, as if we were Might Know these People. At the Same Time, we Also undersstand that we’ll never know these People. The Maze of Names and Facts in Hujar’s Account, the familiarity he and rosenkrantz have with each Other, the way the setting Light Captures the ephemerality of this moment, it all feels like thating of already vanished. We’re Watching A can Spectacle of a Bei SpectaCle – A Man in a Room Relating the Mostly Forgettable Events of the Previous Day – But Somehow, We’re Also Witnesssing the Arc of Time This Hour. SO, no, the film is Maybe Not a Doodle. There’s too craft, too care here for that. But it is a masterpiece.
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