Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day is a film about one man’s unremarkable day in 1974. The reason it feels like paradise is entirely our problem.
| Director | Ira Sachs |
|---|---|
| Year | 2025 |
| Runtime | 76 minutes |
| Cast | Ben Whishaw, Rebecca Hall |
| Award | Sundance Film Festival 2025, Berlin International Film Festival 2025 |
| Streaming | Criterion Channel |
On December 18, 1974, photographer Peter Hujar had a day. Not a remarkable one. He photographed Allen Ginsberg for the New York Times, fielded a call from Susan Sontag, wandered through the city, ate something, thought about things. The following day, he sat in his friend Linda Rosenkrantz’s apartment on the Upper East Side and described it all in detail, rambling and precise and occasionally losing the thread entirely, while she listened and recorded and gently pulled him back when he drifted. The tape was never published. The book Linda planned never happened. The recording sat for fifty years. Ira Sachs found the transcript, and this is what he made from it.
“The reason Hujar’s ordinary day feels like a glimpse of paradise is not because the day was special. It is because nothing interrupted it. We find this almost unbearably beautiful, and the film barely notices that it should.”
Peter Hujar’s Day is 76 minutes of two people in a room. Ben Whishaw plays Hujar with the particular, restless energy of a man whose mind never quite settles, jumping between anecdotes and observations and small resentments and genuine wonder with the freedom of someone who has not yet learned to perform himself for a camera. Rebecca Hall plays Linda Rosenkrantz as something rarer and harder: a listener. She sits across from him for the entire film, responding, prompting, occasionally laughing, never pulling focus. Together they create something that is more séance than cinema. You are not watching a reconstruction. You are watching two people who briefly existed, briefly talking, briefly alive.
Sachs has called the film “a portrait of what it is to be an artist among artists in a city where no one was making any money.” That is true and also slightly modest. What the film actually is, and what no one has quite said plainly, is a fossil.
Not a fossil in the pejorative sense. A fossil in the geological one. Something ordinary from another era, preserved by accident in extraordinary detail, which tells us more about that era than any deliberate record could. Hujar’s day was not chosen because it was significant. Linda’s whole project was predicated on choosing days at random, on the radical democratic idea that any day, fully described, would be worth reading. The fossil is the randomness itself. The fossil is the texture of an uninterrupted mind moving through an uninterrupted day.
No phone pulled Hujar sideways mid-thought. No notification fractured his attention between the Ginsberg shoot and dinner. He moved through December 18, 1974 the way a mind moves when it still belongs entirely to itself, and the result is a day that feels, from the vantage point of 2025, almost incomprehensibly spacious. There is room in it. Room to drift, to observe, to be bored, to notice things that do not matter and linger on them because lingering is still possible. We watch Whishaw’s Hujar describe his hours and feel, with a pang that the film does not manufacture but simply allows to arrive, that we have lost something we did not know we had.
This is not nostalgia for the 1970s. The decade had its own forms of fragmentation and damage and Hujar knew them intimately. This is something more specific: nostalgia for a relationship with time that the attention economy has made structurally impossible. The film is not about New York. It is not even really about Peter Hujar. It is about what it costs to move through a day in full possession of your own attention, and it makes that argument entirely by showing you someone doing it, without ever stating the argument at all.
And then there is Rebecca Hall.
What Hall does in this film deserves more attention than it has received, because it runs against everything contemporary performance rewards. She does not have a breakdown. She does not have a revelation. She does not transform. She sits, and she listens, and she responds, and she is the most compelling person in the room for every minute of it. Watch the way her face processes what Whishaw gives her in real time: not performing reaction but actually receiving information, actually finding things funny or surprising or slightly trying. It is the art of listening rendered visible, and it is almost shocking in its rarity.
Because we have lost this too. Not just the capacity to have an uninterrupted day, but the capacity to be fully present with another person while they have one. The film places Hall’s Linda at the centre of the enterprise without ever making her the subject of it, and in doing so it makes an argument about friendship, about the specific generosity of sustained attention, that is as quietly radical as anything in its 76 minutes. Peter Hujar’s day is the content. Linda Rosenkrantz’s listening is the form. And the form, it turns out, is the whole point.
The most useful comparison is Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre (1981), the closest thing cinema has to a precedent for this kind of deliberately conversational film. Both are essentially records of two people talking. Both create, through pure accumulation of detail and voice, something that should not work as cinema and does. But where My Dinner with Andre is consciously theatrical, self-aware, building toward ideas, Hujar and Linda meander. Their conversation has no destination. It stops and starts and circles back and occasionally falls into comfortable silence. That formlessness is precisely the point and precisely the achievement.
The second comparison is Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), made almost exactly when Hujar was describing his day to Linda. Akerman’s film is also an act of radical attention to the ordinary, also a record of hours passing without narrative intervention, also a film that asks the viewer to find meaning in the texture of daily life rather than in its dramatic peaks. The two films are profoundly different in tone and intention, but they share a belief that looking slowly at how a person actually moves through time is itself a political act. In 1974, this was a formal experiment. In 2025, it is a kind of mourning.
Peter Hujar’s Day will frustrate viewers who need cinema to do more, to arrive somewhere, to justify its existence with incident. Those frustrations are understandable and also, I think, precisely the point. The film asks you to sit still with it. To give it the same quality of attention that Linda gives Peter. To find out whether you still can. Some viewers will discover that they cannot, and that discovery will teach them more about themselves than the film ever could have done by being easier.
Hujar died of AIDS in 1987, before his photographs received the recognition they now hold. Linda Rosenkrantz’s planned book was never published. The recording sat in a drawer for fifty years. And then someone found it, and another artist recognised in it something worth preserving, and here we are: watching a man describe a Thursday in December 1974, finding it, somehow, enough.
It is enough. It is more than enough. It is the kind of enough we have almost forgotten how to receive.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
My Dinner with Andre (Louis Malle, 1981): two people talking for two hours, building toward something Hujar and Linda never bother with, and magnificent for entirely different reasons.
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975): radical attention to the ordinary, made the same year Hujar described his day, and still one of the most necessary films ever made.
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