My fellow Facebook Marketplace addicts and secondhand-furniture aficionados haggling their way to apartment nirvana: I have found the inspiration mother lode in Peter Hujar’s Day.
The new biographical drama from Passages director Ira Sachs takes place entirely in a single gorgeous apartment. The film recreates a 1974 conversation between the American writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) and renowned photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw), recorded as part of a tape series about how people spend their days. Hujar recounts the events of his December 18 in granular detail, from photographing the poet Allen Ginsberg for the New York Times to getting woken up by sex workers, eating a rye sandwich, and stressing over money. Sometimes, in the movie, the friends put on a record or go to the roof to smoke. But for most of the film’s 76-minute run, they just talk.
That might sound boring to you. Personally, as the friend of many brilliant and mercurial gay guys with whom I spend hours discussing everything and nothing, I was charmed by the onscreen dynamic. I had already been curious about Hujar, whose intimate black-and-white photos you have certainly seen before. (That anguished face on the cover of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life? That’s him.) One of the downtown greats, he apparently had “the face of a king … so when his subjects were being photographed, they were in the presence of a man they must have found strikingly beautiful,” the writer Moira Donegan noted earlier this year in a tribute. Embodied by Whishaw, the film version of Hujar comes off churlish and slightly wounded, begrudging the exorbitant demands of New York City and the wild personalities who inhabit it. Even the greats suffer from insecurity: “I have wasted another day,” he says glumly.
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That’s cool, but I kept on getting distracted by the interior décor. Specifically, the lamps: a fringed Victorian lamp in the bedroom next to a frame-less bed, the sun casting the whole room in a warm butter yellow. A pink tulip pendant lamp blooming in the dining room. A red glass table lamp propped onto the piano. In my experience, a good lamp is hard to find. The options are basic and dire, either gigantic arching steel contraptions that cost $400 or, heaven forbid, those imitation-Noguchi lanterns that everyone has now.
This is intentional. You don’t walk out of an Ira Sachs film without coveting a few things. Passages, his 2023 indie drama about a selfish gay man who destroys his marriage to pursue a woman, inspired rabid searches for the character’s linen sheets and slutty mesh tops, as well as dissections of their artfully cluttered Parisian apartment. The loft in Peter Hujar’s Day, set up at Westbeth Artists Housing, is equally enviable; a wide-open, multilevel dream with organic wood accents and plenty of natural light. Inside, time becomes immaterial; morning fades to sunset, then night. Conversation happens, friendship happens. Life happens. Stephen Phelps, the production designer for the film, told me he was given a limited budget and a week to shop; he sourced most of the décor from what he already had or vintage furniture stores off of Interstate 87 in upstate New York. (That tulip lamp? $45!) But there’s one thing in Peter Hujar’s Day you can’t buy: good company.
