Peter Hujar's Day

 

Director Ira Sachs

director on the set

Peter Hujar and Janet Rosenkrantz

Peter Hujar

PETER HUJAR’S DAY           B                                                                                            USA  Germany  Great Britain  Spain  (76 mi)  2025  d: Ira Sachs

His pictures are exotic but not in a shallow, sensational way.  Looking at his photographs of nude men, even of a naked baby boy, is the closest I ever came to experience what it is to inhabit male flesh.  His photographs of animals have that same rare empathy, they are like highly personal portraits.          —Nan Goldin on Peter Hujar

I often have the feeling that in my day, nothing much happens... That I’ve wasted it.                     —Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw)

A memory-play counterpart to Nan Goldin’s blustery female portrait of the underground scene of New York City’s vibrant, gay subculture of the late 1970’s, as depicted in the brilliant Laura Poitras film 2023 Top Ten List #2 All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), as this quiet conversational interview of gay portrait photographer Peter Hujar and journalist Linda Rosenkrantz covers much of the same territory, but in a vastly different style, creating a tribute to a forgotten artist, choosing intimacy, authenticity, and the power of personality in capturing the spirit of the times.  Based on recently rediscovered transcripts from a lost 1974 taped interview by nonfiction writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall, who played Vicky, very much resembling Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, 1977, with her pretensions to art and intellect in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, 2008), in which she asked Hujar (Ben Whishaw, who, lest we forget, played doomed English poet John Keats in Jane Campion’s Bright Star, 2009) to narrate the events of the previous day in minute detail, a project she hoped to expand to other artists, creating a series of these “day in the life” artistic portraits, but it never materialized, yet there’s something subversive and refreshingly experimental about it.  As he recalls the seemingly trivial details of what happened in Rosenkrantz’s Yorkville, Upper East Side apartment, it amounts to a film-long monologue, a rare illustration of how cinema accentuates the written word, fully embracing the power of language in a tightly compressed cinematic space, working in “portraiture,” much like Hujar, creating a representation of a character always questioning his work, mostly taking place in single rooms, moving from a kitchen to a living room to a bedroom, occasionally venturing onto the roof to have a smoke, seen incessantly smoking cigarettes (only 56 cents a pack at the time, complaining that it went up a penny), often engulfed in a cloud of everpresent cigarette smoke, with the sympathetic ear of Rosenkrantz listening intently to every word, projecting a warm, empathetic presence.  Having known each other since their early 20’s (now in their 40’s), a central aspect is having complete trust and faith in one another, coming at a time when photography was not yet recognized as a serious artform, with few gallery sales or exhibits, and artists barely able to eke out a living, but the published success of Diane Arbus quickly changed that.  In Ira Sachs films, artists and their perception play a role, with Hujar realizing that he lies more often than he thinks, creating a narrative that he thinks makes things easier in developing relationships, while also offering a few casual observations about the sexually permissive subculture of the New York art scene, exposing tenderness, pain, frustration, fear, and love, so there are a lot of feelings bubbling beneath the surface.  Stripped of everything except the bare essentials, this short 76-minute excursion into the bohemian art scene reminds us that Sachs is a quintessential New York City filmmaker, capturing a specific moment in New York queer cultural history and a still-influential art scene, filled with name-dropping some of the more iconic artists of the time, yet to him they were friends and contemporaries sharing the same orbit, revealing a completely different, more intimate side of their lives as he photographed them, offering astute takes on the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, Robert Wilson, Vince Aletti, Janet Flanner, Glenn O’Brien, William S. Burroughs, Peter Orlovsky, Ed Baynard, and Maurice Hogenboom, who are just a small sample size.  Perhaps most compelling is his visit to the “dismal” Lower East Side home of Allen Ginsberg, which he describes as “the most run-down tenement,” surprised by the dilapidated apartments and burnt-out buildings in the neighborhood, sent on assignment to photograph him by The New York Times, but an uncooperative Ginsberg completely ignored him and instead sat on the floor and chanted, something she describes as “ohm-land,” with Hujar refusing to interrupt, claiming, “I can’t interrupt God.”  Later Ginsberg went on various rants about corrupt corporate powers, insisting upon being photographed on the exact site where he was recently mugged.   

Hujar died of AIDS in 1987 at the age of 53, mostly penniless, with his on-and-off again lover and artist David Wojnarowicz (who was 20 years younger) at his bedside in the hospital documenting Hujar's final moments, known only among a certain group of people, yet his individualistic personality shines through.  He left behind a complex and profound body of photographs, where he was a leading figure in the group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers, documenting the 1970’s and 80’s East Village scene in a pre-gentrification world of cultural, sexual, and artistic revolution before the AIDS crisis in New York during the tumultuous Reagan and Bush eras.  A film that Sachs describes is “about what it is to be an artist among artists in a city where no one was making any money,” all underappreciated at the time, yet Hujar was enormously admired for his completely uncompromising attitude towards his life and work, a consummate technician, exercising meticulous control in the darkroom, where his portraits of people, animals, and landscapes, with their exquisite black-and-white tonalities, were extremely influential, receiving only marginal public recognition during his lifetime, but he has since become recognized as one of the most influential photographers of the latter half of the 20th century.  Highly emotional yet stripped of excess, Hujar’s photographs are always beautiful, although rarely in a conventional way, but he was never as famous as Nan Goldin or Robert Mapplethorpe.  His extraordinary first book, Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag, was published in 1976, but did not sell well, as his “difficult” personality and refusal to pander to the marketplace insured that it was one of the last published works during his lifetime, as his ambivalence toward success, commerce, and the art world at large often led him to shun the limelight.  An exercise in minimalism, an ode to the banality of everyday life, much of this feels like flipping through the pages of someone else’s diary, where even the smallest details feel significant, as they are attributed to this single personality and no one else, yet Hujar is very much in his element among this extraordinary group of artists, who are never seen, but spoken about in a very matter-of-fact manner, allowing us to briefly hang out with them, reminiscent of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011) as he namedrops his way through art history, while at the same time this is a portrait of an extraordinary artist as an ordinary person, featuring just a camera and the sound of a man’s voice recalling what happened the day before, from the time he woke up until the moment he went to sleep, with no rehearsals prior to the filming, which is rare for an actor with this amount of dialogue.  Sensuously shot in mostly natural light by Alex Ashe (who is himself a photographer) on Super 16mm, creating a grainy, analog texture to match the 1970’s setting, fresh off filming Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s dreamy, yet inspired The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024), this offers a masterclass in composition, capturing the changing light as the day turns into night.  Equally compelling is the exquisite editing by Affonso Gonçalves, who just happened to work on Chloé Zhao’s 2025 Top Ten List #4 Hamnet (2025), while also a frequent collaborator of Todd Haynes, Jim Jarmusch, and Ira Sachs, where in a spontaneous moment the extended microphone attached to a boom is seen as a shadow on the wall.  Never attempting to hide its artifice, what comes as a surprise is the use of Mozart’s Requiem, which is almost shocking in its over-the-top grandeur, yet it adds an operatic grandiosity to small, ordinary moments that become elevated with an extraordinary touch of artistry.  Equally revelatory is a liberating moment of just the two of them dancing around the dining room to the rockabilly sounds of Tennessee Jim - Hold Me Tight YouTube (2:16).

Discovering the 36-page book credited to Rosenkrantz (Linda Rosenkrantz - Peter Hujar's Day) of the missing interview transcripts (Peter Hujar's Day - Read The Screenplay) in a gay Parisian bookstore while shooting 2023 Top Ten List #8 Passages, Hujar was a pioneering queer artist, a man whose presence was so calming that Nan Goldin once called him as “human Valium,” turning away from commercial work early in his career to focus on subjects of his own choosing, including his circle of friends and lovers, landscapes, nudes, and animals, looming large as both a brilliant artist and valuable mentor in the Lower East Side avant garde arts/cultural scene of the 1970’s and 80’s.  Evoking a feeling of time and place, with both Hujar and Sachs using the camera as an instrument of intimacy, capturing a surprising amount of emotional depth without resorting to any form of intellectualism, as there is no plot or conflict in the conventional sense, nor are any changes in the characters’ lives depicted, yet in the mind of the filmmaker, the book was radical in its honesty, providing a cinematic landscape of what constitutes a queer artist, where the idea of just two people talking in a room, with no romantic intentions, has perhaps not been done since Louis Malle’s MY DINNER WITH ANDRE (1981), Jonathan Demme’s one-man autobiographical monologue by Spalding Gray in SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA (1987), or James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour 2015), a fictionalized account of successful American novelist David Foster Wallace recounting his heavily dialogue-driven reflections to a young Rolling Stone reporter.  Having worked with Whishaw before in PASSAGES, both share a deep curiosity about art and beauty, life and queerness, and an interest not limited to movies alone, but including all the various art forms, where the simplicity of the film speaks volumes, as Hujar’s unsparing comments are so authentic, unguarded and raw, filled with moments of self-doubt, spoken so naturally, where his artistic insecurities are on full display, worrying about the high costs of everything, with nothing showy or melodramatic, receiving a barrage of phone calls, spending a lot of time in his darkroom developing pictures, with the names of fellow artists flowing off his lips with ease, where it helps to be well-versed in the New York literary scene of the 1970’s, as otherwise it becomes confusing why these names are given so much screen time.  What these people have created, nobody does anymore, so it feels really distant, a portrait of a lost time, a culture that has disappeared, just like the neighborhoods being discussed which have been razed over from gentrification.  It may be lost on viewers that both actors in front of the camera portraying American artists happen to be British, which you’d never know, rendered beautifully by both, with Hall breaking out some variation of a Bronx accent, but the onscreen presence of Whishaw, in particular, is hypnotic in its subtlety, arguably the actor’s finest hour, as he lures viewers into his highly personalized world and somehow makes even the smallest details matter, as if he actually possesses a photographic memory, like waiting in line the day before, yet recalling the exact price of someone else’s Chinese takeout order.  Literally immersed in a communal art world that has long since passed, this period may be a renaissance heyday of underground New York artists, seen in a totally different light than their public personas, told from a perspective of someone who knew and worked with them all, offering a stream-of-consciousness portrait of a moment in time and the kind of tiny events that make up a day in the life of these iconic figures, some of it amusing, some demeaning, actually sounding more like friendly gossip, yet what crosses Hujar’s mind offers insights into how artists see themselves, as they’re just ordinary people who can produce extraordinary moments that can become timeless.  Sachs was able to collaborate with a 90-year old Rosenkrantz, from sharing photographs to describing in detail her friendship with Hujar, making a film about what amounts to two people talking while sharing their insights, leading to an intimate relationship between the camera and its subject, including a scene that was edited out of the book, KVIFF.TV • Peter Hujar's Day (clip) • Video online YouTube (1:33).

Marty Supreme

 

Director Josh Safdie 

Timothée Chalamet on the set

Safdie with Timothée Chalamet

Darius Khondji on the set

Tokyo set

Marty Reisman, 1946

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MARTY SUPREME              B-                                                                                         Finland  USA  (150 mi)  2025  ‘Scope  d: Josh Safdie

I have a purpose.  You don’t.  And if you think that’s some kind of blessing, it’s not.  It means I have an obligation to see a very specific thing through.  And with that obligation comes sacrifice. 
—Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet)

A bit of a hot mess, a sprawling, anxiety-ridden, and extremely over-produced film with loud, instrusive music by composer Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) that plays throughout, though there’s an exquisite use of popular songs of the 1980’s, also synthesizer sounds from the same era, opening and closing with Tears for Fears, but the original score offers no hint of subtlety, as if the entire film is a remix video.  Made by Josh Safdie, the first time not working with his younger brother Benny, the makers of Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019), excelling in expressing that New York City vibe, where this has the same frantic, adrenaline-laced energy, loosely inspired by the life of early 1950’s ping pong aficionado Marty Reisman ("Marty Reisman – US Table Tennis Hall of Fame") and his book, The Money Player: The Confessions of America’s Greatest Table Tennis Champion and Hustler (1974), where in the 40’s and 50’s, New York City table tennis was a collection of misfits and gamblers, where betting on the game drove the sport, with a talented player able rake in hundreds in a single night, which would be the equivalent of thousands today.  There already is a documentary made about the flamboyant Reisman, Leo Leigh’s FACT OR FICTION: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A PING PONG HUSTLER (2014).  The hustler aspect of the sport recalls the eloquent pool playing grace of Jackie Gleason’s Minnesota Fats, the best player in the world, and Paul Newman’s rising star Fast Eddie Felson in Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961), though this doesn’t come close to the tension-filled, insatiably-interesting character study of that memorable film, which perfectly captured the stench and dingy atmosphere of the smoke-filled poolroom.  The raison d’être of this film is Timothée Chalamet as Marty Mauser, so good in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (2017) and James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown (2024), who has secretly been preparing for this role for six or seven years, continually training and becoming familiar with the game, even traveling with a table while he worked on other films, creating a fictionalized portrait of the most flamboyantly charismatic table tennis player the world has ever witnessed, whose live-wire approach carries nearly every scene of the film, literally careening from place to place.  Written by Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, who both co-edited the film as well, this becomes a collaborative effort in creating an immersive portrait of what’s commonly known as a bullshit artist that feels like a psychotic-driven, impressionistic mosaic of neverending mood swings.  While ostensibly about ping pong, the protagonist feels more like the volatile and ferociously temperamental chess champion Bobby Fischer of table tennis, both viewing the game as nothing less than armed combat, as the film reveals just how difficult it was to build a career around a sport that still hadn’t caught on in the United States.  Table tennis didn’t become an Olympic sport until 1988 (no American has ever medaled), so Marty had to go to great lengths to hustle money in the most unorthodox of ways, bordering on criminality, to finance his dream of becoming a world champion, knowing he was talented enough, but finding his way into international tournaments on the other side of the world was another story.

Listed at #2 at IndieWire: The 25 Best Movies of 2025, and #3 at The Playlist: The 25 Best Films of 2025 and New York Times: Manohla Dargis: Best Movies of 2025, it’s all about having a single-minded purpose, as we initially find Marty, a Lower East Side Jewish kid stuck working in his uncle’s shoestore, where we hear him bragging that he could sell shoes to an amputee, taking a break from fitting women’s shoes to have a backroom tryst with his childhood sweetheart, Rachel (Odessa A’zion), who is married to someone else that treats her badly, exuding passion in everything he does as he desperately tries to raise the money to afford airfare to England to play in their invitational.  Crossing the line at every turn, Marty justifies his deplorable antics by thinking the ends justify the means, but not everyone else sees it that way, as he’s a natural born street hustler and swindler, where many are swayed by his charms, including Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), a retired Hollywood movie actress from the 30’s on the verge of A Streetcar Named Desire theatrical comeback, who he sees across the room in a fancy restaurant at the Ritz in London, finagling his way into her hotel room, where she doesn’t know whether to call security or embrace his hare-brained schemes, as he exudes such a sense of feverish urgency that she’s inevitably drawn into his youthful sexual orbit, actions she later regrets.  Invariably, it’s her incredibly wealthy and supremely successful businessman husband that peaks his interest, Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), thinking opportunity knocks as he sees dollar signs, playing out like some twisted and demented version of the American Dream, with Marty trying to promote his own idea of orange-colored ping pong balls entitled Marty Supreme, with the words “Made in America” printed underneath the name, thinking this will change the game, as a white ball against white shirts is hard to see.  While Marty is supremely confident, to the point of arrogance and cockiness, he’s also deluded and self-destructive, prone to creating chaos wherever he goes, thinking Rockwell should just throw money at him, as he’s such a sure bet, but Marty shoots down all his offers that are little more than an excuse to promote his own business product, using Marty as an exhibition act to help sell his world-acclaimed pens, a proposal Marty finds deeply offensive, always believing that he’s the star, not some novelty act playing second fiddle, so these discussions are a little rocky, with the businessman quickly losing patience on this unproven commodity.  It’s only a matter of time, however, before Marty’s life deteriorates into utter mayhem, having to deal with one disaster after another, finding himself destitute and all alone, where playing ping pong is the only thing that he’s actually good at, supremely confident in his abilities, just oozing with braggadocio, belittling others as not in his same league, described in the press as “the Chosen One,” bragging that he is “the ultimate product of Hitler’s defeat,” where he’s a consummate trash talker before the phrase was even invented, something Mohammad Ali elevated to an artform in the sport of boxing in the 1960’s.  Shot on 35mm in ‘Scope by Darius Khondji, who shot the brother’s previous film, this tries to recreate the nuances of the early 50’s, with some degree of success, but mostly this is shot indoors in claustrophobic hotel rooms, small spaces, or cavernous arenas with multiple ping pong matches being played at once.         

What’s important to understand is that the sport itself is overlooked, small, and dismissed, yet the film is driven by Marty’s relentless obsession to be the best ping pong player in the world, which may as well be the ambitious pursuit of flying men to the moon, as it just fails to register with anyone else around him, who see it as little more than a hobby.  At the time, American players met in dingy basements on the margins of anything resembling a sport other than maybe high-stakes poker, while attracting large crowds filling stadiums in Europe and Asia.  Yet for all the negativity he encounters, it only drives him more, hustling his way from table tennis tables in New York to Paris, Tokyo, and even the Great Pyramids of Egypt, shamelessly chipping off a souvenir from one of the giant blocks at the base and handing it to his mother, reminding her, “We built that” (a common misconception), where the film is defined by his daring physicality, putting himself on the line, creating a fully-charged persona that lives on the edge, that thrives in adversity, where he’s a bit of a showman, doing trick shots for curious spectators who are in awe of his unleashed talent, as he was known for using a Coke bottle for a paddle, or a garbage-can lid, a shoe, a light bulb, his eyeglasses, while making behind-the-back or under-the-leg returns, Marty Supreme Exclusive Clip - Semifinals (2025) YouTube (2:08).  His pièce de résistance was to place a cigarette at the opposite end of the table and then, crushing the ball with his powerful forehand, break the cigarette in two.  The entire film is an adrenaline rush, thwarted at every turn, denied the opportunities of a lifetime, so he just doubles down on his dream, where his deluded sense of entitlement is distinctly American, yet his sharp wit, brash impulsiveness, astonishingly cruel and inappropriate language, and giant-sized ego will simply not be denied, matched only by his superlative talent.  A narcissist in development, the changing parts all around him are a revolving door of whoever happens to benefit him the most, as he’s constantly charging ahead, like a bull in a China shop, where calamities are an everyday occurrence, harming anyone and everyone around him, but he refuses to let that stop him.  This gargantuan obsession with a dream both propels and consumes him, where at times it feels like a demolition derby, as it’s an exhausting journey built around a transformative performance by Chalamet, an inveterate liar and relentless scoundrel who’s always working the angles, but continuously gets sidetracked by a myriad of side journeys that lead to personal disasters and self-inflicted catastrophes.  The problem is there’s not an ounce of self-reflection in the film, no pauses to think and re-evaluate how best to get his life on track in order to achieve his real purpose and main goal.  Hell, we never once even see the man practice or train, so apparently he just expects to win, like wishful thinking.  Despite spending two and a half hours in what amounts to a psychological character study with one central character onscreen nearly the entire time, in the end we still know next to nothing about him, while none of the secondary characters are allowed to have their own developed lives apart from Marty, instead they disappear just as quickly as they are seen.  What that leaves is a pervasive emptiness that, despite the whirlwind of kinetic energy, saturates the mood of the entire film.    

One of the more amazing stories comes from Marty’s friend Béla Kletzki (Hungarian actor and poet Géza Röhrig, who starred in the acclaimed 2015 László Nemes Holocaust movie Son of Saul (Saul Fia), a former Hungarian table tennis star from the 30’s, who survived Auschwitz when he was recognized by a German prison guard on his way to the gas chambers, then sent to defuse bombs on the camp outskirts, which is based on what actually happened to Polish player Alojzy Ehrlich (Alojzy Ehrlich: The Jewish Table Tennis Champion Who ...).  While there are some extraordinary shots of tournament play, accentuated by some exceptional production design by the legendary Jack Fisk, who over the past 50 years has worked with Terrence Malick, Brian De Palma, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson, he runs into one particularly difficult opponent who becomes his nemesis, Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi, a 26-year-old real-life deaf table tennis champion from Japan), reportedly deaf as a result of the American firebombing of Tokyo, who has the entire Japanese nation behind him, a powerful outlet for national pride and identity in the postwar Japanese recovery, who are simply enthralled with his abilities.  Endo’s fictional character is based upon Hiroji Satoh, who won the World Table Tennis Championship in 1952.  While barely touched upon in the film, Endo’s prowess is largely due to the changed racket design, with a sponge-covered foam rubber on one side instead of a hard paddle, allowing him to place more spin and achieve greater speed than a traditional paddle, while also muting the sound that players take a lifetime to be able to detect, like getting a jump on a fly ball to the outfield in baseball.  At first this flummoxes Marty, as he’s never encountered this before, and it takes some time before he develops an answer.  This revolutionary development in paddles actually became a bone of contention with the real Marty Reisman, eschewing it as “fraud and deception” because overnight, former champions were suddenly reduced to has-beens, preferring the challenges of an original wood design, claiming it required greater skill.  This same argument happened in the game of tennis, as the wood rackets in the Rod Laver era gave way to the steel rackets of Jimmy Connors, as both he and Billy Jean King dominated the sport afterwards.  While this is a typical Safdie Brothers’ roller coaster thrill ride designed to be a crowdpleaser, where it’s relentlessly volatile at every turn, not sure it amounts to much more than that, despite being A24’s most expensive film to date, with the studio pulling out all the stops in a ridiculous, multi-month promotional campaign in an attempt to capture mainstream appeal, however, detours into violence and family melodrama feel like unnecessary distractions, with a less than scintillating and highly conventional finale leading to an epic Tears for Fears song over the end credits, yet the corrosive personality of the alienated protagonist does feel like a counterpoint to the Coen Brothers’ time capsule depiction of the early, pre-Dylan Greenwich Village folk scene of Inside Llewyn Davis (2012).      

Note

Easy to miss is director Abel Ferrara (a dangerous criminal, of course), and brief cameo appearances by Fran Drescher (Marty’s mother), Sandra Bernhard (her friend living downstairs), New York–based author Larry “Ratso” Sloman as Marty’s shoestore-owning uncle, billionaire grocery store mogul John Catsimatidis as the father of a friend, rap artist Tyler, the Creator as Marty’s cab-driving friend, fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi as Kay’s publicist who gets theater tickets for Marty, prolific writer Naomi Fry as Kay’s assistant, novelist Pico Iyer as head of the International Table Tennis Association, playwright David Mamet (an actual ping pong hustler in his early years) as a theater director, comedian Penn Jillette as a hair-trimmed, kick-ass farmer, high-wire act Philippe Petit as an MC, multiple medal-winning German table tennis champion Timo Boll, Hall of Fame NBA legend George “the Iceman” Gervin as a table tennis club owner, and also NBA greats Tracy McGrady and Kemba Walker as Harlem Globetrrotters.  The real-life Marty Reisman died in 2012 at the age of eighty-two.