Few genres feel as safe and facile as biopics, which contort a person’s famous accomplishments into PR strategies. There’s little sense of discovery or even of a present tense in biopics, which is to say there is little drama. Of course there are exceptions, but come on: “biopic” is practically a pejorative at this point, synonymous with Oscar bait.
The adventurous “Peter Hujar’s Day” reveals what is missing from the genre.
The film unfolds over one day in one setting: Dec. 19th, 1974 in the 94th street Manhattan apartment of Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall). Linda has asked her friend, the rising photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) to recount the entirety of his previous day. He obliges. That is the whole movie and it is more than enough.
Writer-director Ira Sachs has compressed a real transcript that was unearthed a few years ago, part of an unrealized project in which Rosenkrantz would document singular days of a variety of subjects. (Her Hujar transcript did, however, yield a book.)
The experiment feels Warholian in its determination to mine the quotidian textures of life for art, essentially saying that the many days we consider to be indistinguishable or forgettable are the manna of life. It’s not a new sentiment — think “life happens while you’re making other plans” — but it’s a sentiment that few filmmakers seem willing to authentically embrace.
Many movies, especially biopics, are so busy encouraging us to realize our dreams, usually equated to making money, that everyday pleasures are ignored or undervalued. And movies are merely reflecting the warped priorities of our culture at large. Get that job, do that new diet, endlessly surf your phone for things to titillate and enrage you.
Rosenkrantz, and now Sachs, practice what they preach. They impose no formula on the experiment, drawing you into a man’s recollections so rigorously that you walk out thinking about the lunch he had, the people he ran into, work tedium, etc. The movie is composed of nothing but seemingly incidental textures and encounters. Hujar assumed that he had done nothing the day before, until he begins Rosenkrantz’s assignment.
Each detail in “Peter Hujar’s Day” is imbued with an ecstatic intensity that harks back to the counterculture, which in the 1970s was dying as people came to accept greed as being good again. Yes, I’m being broad, and, no, I wasn’t there, but the nihilism of modern times makes me no less prone than anyone else to nostalgia for things unknown and/or distorted over time. This film and Rosenkrantz’s project are responses to these kinds of feelings — candles lit against darkness.
Admittedly, Hujar is not a regular guy. He ran in circles that include the names that always pop up in stories of vintage hipster-beatnik-counterculture New York City. Quite a bit of time is spent on Hujar’s efforts to take Allen Ginsberg’s picture for the New York Times, an anecdote that encapsulates Ginsberg’s sense of himself as a brand even as he lives in trendy poverty. Money-versus-art-versus-truth runs through this picture, as these were very 1970s-era concerns. (These days we aren’t expected to pretend to hate money.)
There are references to Susan Sontag and William S. Burroughs, of whom Hujar took unforgettable photographs. There are references to parts of the city that have long been gentrified. Hujar’s recounting is rich in the hypocrisy and terror and passion of many inter-associated figures of renown. But these stories don’t land as gossipy as you might imagine, and the mundane, Warholian textures keep upstaging the juicier stuff. I left the film thinking about moo goo gai pan with Vince Aletti, who ran with Hujar and had a habit of stopping by his apartment for showers. I left thinking of the Bob Dylan poster on Ginsberg’s apartment and Hujar’s struggles to get paid for his work, etc.
“Peter Hujar’s Day” is not a lifeless museum piece slash rarefied art experiment. Hujar’s stories are arresting because we are accorded a double vision of what he says and how he says it. Hujar’s halting voice and tentative yet confident physicality lend his anecdotes an aura of vulnerability. We are hearing a man recount a life to which he seems to feel as if he doesn’t entirely belong. Hujar throws stories away, not glibly, but rather out of an impression that they don’t matter, which Sachs and Whishaw refute.
Whishaw is extraordinary, investing each story with a sense of mystery and self-loathing—that sense of “not belonging” intensifies as the movie unfolds. Hall has a challenging role, as she is playing a person who spends the film listening to someone else. And in this potentially passive role Hall gives the best performance of her career. Hall makes Rosenkrantz profoundly present; coaxing Hujar, goofing on him, investing her gestures with a sense of the history of this friendship. This is not a stagey movie of people saying lines. You are invited to watch as well as listen.
Dialogue-driven movies get a bad rap anyway. A common assertion is that talking and words aren’t “cinematic,” as if cinema were built only on visuals. Yes, there are plenty of unimaginative movies that feel like filmed rehearsals of scripts, but there is also a rich tradition of movies that use talk as the foundation of drama. I don’t leave “My Dinner with Andre” craving a tracking shot. Ditto many of Richard Linklater’s movies, not to mention Louis Malle’s astonishing “Vanya on 42nd Street” which restages the play as a lean and mean rehearsal and somehow releases something new in it.
“Peter Hujar’s Day” belongs to that kind of tradition, and visually it is lively and convincing, with an insinuating camera that forges a kinship between the actors and audience. Watching a man talk in a room we come to feel that we have seen him, which is what Hujar achieved in his photographs.
While we’re feeling a little woo-woo, flush over the possibilities of life and art and community, a word about the documentary “Secret Mall Apartment,” a current hit on Netflix. No wonder that it’s popular: that catchy title is irresistible. Living in a mall? It sounds awful, a dimension of noise and light and pointless knick knacks and junk food. But there’s a glutton in me that is turned on by it, especially for its echo of George A. Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” and Bertrand Bonello’s “Nocturama,” both movies set in malls that are critical of capitalism yet sympathetic to its obvious lures, namely that consuming things is fun no matter how damaging.
The mall in question is Providence Place, an enormous structure in Rhode Island, where several people in their 20s lived off and on undetected for four years in the early aughts. They lived in an apartment they created from a weird nook in the mall that suggests a cross between a loft and a crawlspace. They put in furniture, which they somehow hefted up a large ladder, and built a cinder-block wall. After a while the space came to resemble an actual domicile, a self-imposed prison as community center.
Their leader was Michael Townsend, who was found out in 2007, which of course became a novelty news item. This story has parallels to the adventure of that dude hiding out in the toy store who inspired last year’s underrated Channing Tatum movie “Roofman,” but Townsend is cuddlier with crimes that are easier to rationalize. He’s an artist who sees the mall apartment thing as a cross between an installation and a happening — art, in other words. The lovely surprise of “Secret Mall Apartment” resides in how persuasively it manages to put Townsend’s point of view across.
The story of the mall is a tale as old as time. Enormous amounts of money were put into the facility to court affluent customers, while nearby neighborhoods were razed in the name of gentrification. Lost in that assault on the poor were the abandoned factories that were fashioned into apartments, where Townsend lived and created an immersive art space. Townsend has a flair for impermanent hidden art. Footage of a series of sculptures that he erected in a canal is among the film’s many visual marvels.
Director Jeremy Workman teases the story out cleverly, with a flashback structure that allows your sense of Townsend and this mall stunt to gradually deepen. Townsend, who participated in this doc along with his co-conspirators, suggests an authentic innocent, a man who lives for artistic expression without ulterior motives. He might actually be above money, which sounds high-minded but also creates its own problems. “Secret Mall Apartment” doesn’t try to turn Townsend into a saint; it emulates his innocent puckish spirit and lets you contemplate the reverberations of the stunt for yourself.
Namely the reverberation of cast-offs finding a way to humanize the commercial vessel that destroyed their neighborhood, a battle of community and capitalism that is intrinsic to the building of the modern urban United States. But, again, Workman treats us like adults. He knows the premise essentially speaks for itself, and there are wrinkles and ambiguities that keep the movie from becoming a traditional anti-capitalist sermon.
As one of the people in the collective says, there is something comforting about the space they create, a reassurance in sleeping in the belly of this beast. They moved apart from society by entering into its nucleus.
“Peter Hujar’s Day” is now streaming on the Criterion Channel. “Secret Mall Apartment” is streaming on Netflix.
