Director: Ira Sachs

Stars: Ben Whishaw, Rebecca Hall

Writer-director Ira Sachs’ follow-up to the knotty romance ‘Passages’ is an intimate and elegant drama, beautifully played by its two leads, and based on recorded conversations thought lost until 2019. It’s December 1974 in Manhattan and photographer Peter Hujar (Whishaw) is spending the day being quizzed by his friend, the writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Hall) about the events of the last twenty-four hours. The recording was to be part of a project in which Rosenkrantz would chronicle the quotidian details of artists’ lives which were never realised. Sachs deftly charts the ebb and flow of the conversation between the old friends; she relaxed and warm, he restless and mildly waspish but obviously fond of his confidante. Occasionally during the brief seventy-five-minute running time, Sachs breaks through the lived-in naturalism with shots of his crew filming the exchanges and blasts of music. The director is also good at evoking that almost mythical pre-80s time in NYC when artists could scrape by in cheap housing with the most entertaining and juicy part of Peter’s account being when he describes going to photograph an eccentric and capricious Alan Ginsberg, while worrying if his jacket will fit in with the lower East Side hipsters.

David Willoughby

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