Talking is hard.
This is a lesson I learned at the ripe age of 16, when, confronted with the task of having to memorize and deliver several lines in a Brecht play, I choked and repeatedly tripped over my own tongue in front of a paying audience. Of course, to talk without the burden of memorization and delivery is easy enough; yapping remains a finer skill of mine, no doubt honed by my proximity to and inclusion within a family of yappers, each of us fearful of silences spanning any longer than five seconds. But talking through words written down with heightened stylistic flourish by an esteemed genius author requires a muscle I simply don’t have, a brain I can’t swap with someone destined to be a good actor. This is, in part, why I stopped doing community theatre. At some point it dawned on me that I couldn’t talk my way through lines without sounding like I was just learning how to speak.
This is not a problem Ben Whishaw has, thank goodness. As the titular photographer in Ira Sachs’ contained yet masterful Peter Hujar’s Day—based on a real, dynamic conversation between Hujar and Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall)—talking is the driving force of a narrative built atop the banality of everyday interactions with co-workers, friends, and fair-weather friends. As Hujar, Whishaw’s queer lilt anchors a series of recollected real-life conversations with artists and writers like Susan Sontag and Allen Ginsberg, delivered with the tonal exhaust of someone in desperate need of a vacation upstate for the weekend to just sit in a cabin alone. Whishaw’s delivery of Hujar’s words feels off-the-cuff in the way anyone surely sounds when asked to describe their day at length. In Whishaw’s hands, this never-ending stream of dialogue feels entirely natural, without pretense. At no point does his speech slip into the realm of ‘actor,’ thereby severing the line between belief and its suspension. Behind this naturality, there exists a searching quality to Hujar’s words, to parse the difference between an interesting detail and a boring one. At one point, Hujar even asks if his ramblings are boring, to which Rosenkrantz replies “It’s not boring to ME!” This claim feels central to the film’s makeup—a story is only as captivating as its listener. As Hujar talks and talks, Rosenkrantz’s eyes never glaze over or break focus. While much critical praise has been heaped—deservedly—on Whishaw’s mile-a-minute musings on colleagues and the like, Hall’s performance makes his most niche anecdotes digestible. Boredom becomes a kind of challenge while watching. I want to be as elegant and attentive as Hall’s Rosenkrantz, and if she says she isn’t bored, then I refuse to be bored, even by the intimate specificities of Hujar’s day zipping over my head.
In the pantheon of what I call Great Fag Hag Cinema, Hall’s take on Rosenkrantz is a premier, top-shelf example of ‘acting is reacting.’ Joining the ranks of other Fag Hag classics like Tom Ford’s A Single Man and Mark Waters’ Mean Girls, Peter Hujar’s Day’s chamber-esque proceedings allow the film to exude a kind of privacy between its leads, with Rosenkrantz’s ear and attentive probing helping steer Hujar’s frustrations about money and art toward their equally frustrating conclusions. (A few anecdotes Hujar shares reveal his desire to be paid for his work without having to literally ask to be paid for it, a resonant complaint for freelancers everywhere.) The constraint of using Rosenkrantz’s apartment as the sole setting for the film is also noteworthy on account of its relative lack of stuffiness. Her furnishings exude a lived-in comfort which allows Hujar’s exasperations to roam free. The colors of the space are warm and homey, devoid of contemporary and distracting metallic sheen. If talking is the driving force of the movie, the contained intimacy of the apartment—and its rooftop—informs the emotional tenor of speech in a way that the world outside this private space cannot.
For if talking is hard, existing in silence can be even harder. This, I know again, from experience. The temptation to fill a quiet room with empty verbiage is an impulse that is difficult to fight against. Silence tells us there are things we may never have access to, alerts us to the possibility of others’ thoughts we can never know. Silence can also make a room feel electric, charged with meaning. In Sachs’ film, Rosenkrantz’s apartment alerts us to what silence can offer the visual dimensions of friendship, how one can fill space with action, rather than speech. The apartment also allows for moments that divorce themselves from tape, instances that can’t be transcribed from a recording and repeated. In these smaller moments, Peter Hujar’s Day transcends its dialogue. In one scene, Hujar and Rosenkrantz sit, and then lay down, on what is presumably her bed. The light is dim, their outlines barely visible. Hujar smokes a cigarette while Rosenkrantz stares up at the ceiling. In this rare moment of quiet, the artifice of conversation, propelled by Rosenkrantz’s project of interviewing artists about their day, fades. What remains are two friends, inches apart, luxuriating in the company of the other without having to articulate anything other than mere presence.
This is a moment that the recorder can’t pick up—where sound exits and Sachs’ camera takes over to remind us that what we’re watching is as much imagined as it is real. While the audio tape exists, and the words Hujar says are documented, the in-between moments—or pauses—where language ceases allow for fabulations of togetherness. These moments remind me of moments with my own friends, moments that feel especially charged not because of what was said, but because the fact of existing next to someone, in silence, can say just as much about a relationship as talking it through. These moments are fleeting, yet help to interrupt what is otherwise one artist questioning another. Beyond what the tape can reveal, Sachs’ camera enables us to see the history of a friendship through actions that reveal a closeness honed over time. We see Hujar and Rosenkrantz dance to a record and pose for portraits with each other. We see, as they do, the sun setting over Rosenkrantz’s apartment building, a cigarette shared next to a lit window. And it is because we are privy to these moments that we understand why Hujar is able to share the intricacies of his day freely and unyieldingly with her.
The film, on its surface, may feel slight on account of its slim runtime and seemingly small stakes. But after sitting with a second viewing, what Peter Hujar’s Day opens my vision to is the sublime ordinariness of being with others, and the utter privilege of having people in my life to talk to relentlessly about whatever. In my life, I find that conversation rarely brings about feelings of catharsis or emotional release. For the most part, the dialogues between my friends and I are banal, filled with tiny, specific details no eavesdropper would find memorable. And yet, as unmemorable as the majority may be, they exist amidst the timeline of all the other conversations we have had, the heavy and the light, the revelatory and the hollow. They exist as proof of contact, and it is by luck that we might get to hear them repeated to us again, on tape, in a voicemail, in an e-mail, in a text. It is by luck, sheer beautiful luck, that we may know each other at all.