In Our Day (Uriui haru)

 

Writer/director Hong Sang-soo

IN OUR DAY (Uriui haru)                B-                                                                                  South Korea  (83 mi)  2023  d: Hong Sang-soo

A diptych of two interconnected storylines, in this case two renowned artists, an actress and a poet who never meet, yet have younger visitors who come to visit seeking guidance and advice.  Immersed in the banalities of our everyday existence, this evolves into something more, leading to unexpected complexities that arise from the simplicity of the format.  The filmmaker writes, directs, films, produces, edits, and composes the scores to his films, which are very dialogue driven, with a lyrical orchestral motif opening and closing the film, where each of his movies have a very similar style, with end credits that last only a few seconds.  What this resembles is the Socratic method of using ordinary question-and-answer dialogue to spark critical thinking, to explore larger, more complex ideas, where its deceptively simple structure and unvarnished aesthetic allows quiet, intimate moments to breathe life into unearthing profound truths in the mundane.  Embracing subtlety in the unspoken and the art of the understated, with long dialogues that always seem to revolve around a single point, without ever finding it, as words fail to fill the void between people, often leaving behind an even deeper sense of loneliness, yet this is a very simple premise that produces an elevated discussion on modern existence.  Not exactly riveting cinema, this is low-key, even for this director, but he’s attempting to get at something that is largely ignored in today’s cinema, as the relaxed, informality on display allows for a more personal discussion, as there’s a lot of wisdom coming out of this movie, accentuating how young people seem to want answers now, while an older generation appreciates acquiring a perspective from the experience of actually living a life, where the characters are really trying to get at a better understanding of their own lives, often without success, so they seek guidance.  Hong explores our constant striving to find meaning and how this evolves alongside age and experience.  The structure itself doesn’t always feel natural, often appearing forced, where there’s even a brief moment of melodramatic hysteria that is completely absent from the rest of the Hong repertoire, feeling weirdly out of sorts, as if brought in from another movie, where viewers can certainly question its use, wondering why such a delicately subtle movie exhibits an elevated emotional outburst that has been intentionally absent from the director’s other works.  So that may be what stands out, as it doesn’t fit the mold, but other than that, this is an extremely understated style of filmmaking, shot inside apartments in controlled settings, feeling claustrophobic at times, where just walking out onto the balcony produces an air of freedom and liberation.  There’s also the use of a fluffy cat connecting these two episodes, affectionate and friendly in the first, but it goes missing, producing the over-the-top emotional hysteria, while in the second the poet’s cat is recently dead, but continues to have a lingering influence.  The effect animals have on human owners is something rare and significant, where there’s a special connection, like being part of the family, as it’s life after all, and that matters, in all its iterations.   

Hong uses an inner title card like chapter headings, used to describe state of mind as well as catch us up on what’s happening (“Sang-won trusts her friend, but she thinks the only one she can trust is herself”), a technique that was also used by Chaplin and Keaton during the silent era, as it adds greater psychological complexity, but this film lacks the offbeat charm in some of his other movies.  Sang-won (Kim Min-hee) is a successful actress recently returned to Korea, who is staying with her friend Jung-soo (Song Sun-mi) and her cat named “Us,” eventually joined by her cousin, an aspiring actress named Ji-soo (Park Mi-so).  Sang-won takes an interest in Jung-soo’s cat Us, feeding and petting him, getting down on the floor with him, with a large mirror covering an entire wall reflecting what we see, but the camera never intrudes.  While Sang-won is drinking coffee, Jung-soo is sipping wine.  Soon, Sang-won’s cousin Ji-soo arrives bearing gifts in the form of a basket of beauty products, including organic soaps and natural oils.  When asked about acting, Sang-won indicates honesty is the key, as everything is generated from that core value, which is why it is so essential.  But it’s not easy being honest in a predetermined system controlled by others, who write what you say and instruct where you move before the cameras, leaving you little choice but to follow their orders.  This exasperating and suffocating system takes all the fun out of acting, as you must confine yourself to the ideas and values of others, not your own, which makes it extremely difficult to give honest performances.  Based on these contradictions, she’s not really interested in acting anymore, as you tend to lose your own perspective when continually trying to please others.  Cutting to a different scene across town, old poet Hong Ui-ju (Gi Ju-bong) is at a different crossroads (“Hong Ui-ju has belatedly become popular with young people, but all he wants is to live a peaceful life free of pain”), as his health won’t allow him to drink and smoke anymore, yet they were two of his most cherished things in life, as he became recognized as an artist for being associated with taking great pleasure in drinking and smoking, often with meals, where they just seemed to go together.  But his heart is bad, weakened by clogged arteries, so those habits would invite a death sentence if he continued.  Unaware of this recent change, young actor Jae-won (Ha Seong-guk) also comes bearing gifts of cigarettes and alcohol, armed with questions to ask the poet, who has found sudden popularity among young people, yet it’s the temptations that lie in wait that seem to matter.  Sharing connections as the film goes on, using a deeply personal style described as domestic realism, Hong makes slow-moving dramas about everyday dilemmas, relationships, and artistic aspirations, examining the effect it has on our lives, exploring fundamental themes of loneliness, incommunicability, and the search for authenticity.

Cutting back and forth between stories, a young film student Ki-joo (Kim Seung-yun) is finishing up shooting a documentary film about the old poet, so she films him taking great delight in eating ramyun noodles, adding hot pepper paste to enhance the flavor, making it more spicy, mirrored by Sang-won when she eats ramyun in the exact same way, but it reminds him that this would go great with a glass of soju.  Accommodating his desires, she goes out to buy non-alcoholic beer, but this only reminds him of what he’s missing, and it’s only a matter of time before they’re sharing a banquet of fried chicken with soju and cigarettes, which is like a return of all his former pleasures, becoming intoxicated with what he’d been missing, with the three of them taking great pleasure in the drinking game of rock, paper, scissors, with the loser required to drink a glass of soju, where the young apprentices continually finding themselves losing.  Meanwhile, across town, the cat escaped, apparently jumping from the balcony, leaving Jung-soo utterly devastated, left screaming and moaning while writhing on the floor in tears, where she can’t imagine her life without her cat, just like the old poet can’t imagine living a life without soju and cigarettes.  So when these precious things have been taken away, it opens new doors of insight, which are not necessarily welcome or appreciated.  It begs the question about what is the true self, where the pursuit of honesty becomes exceedingly difficult to obtain.  In this light, Sang-won gives an impassioned defense for why she can’t work in the commercialized film industry any more, which may as well be the independent film manifesto for Hong Sang-soo, while the old poet gives an equally passionate treatise on the art of poetry and whether it still matters in this day and age, where people don’t read poetry anymore or pay as much attention as they do the other arts.  While sitting on an outside terrace, he urges them to be careful not to get hung up on big philosophical concepts like love, honesty, and truth, which remain always evasive, and instead concentrate on the little things that matter, encouraging them to “Be thankful for the small things that are right in front of us.”  Unlike the beginning, which took forever to find its footing, the film builds momentum towards the end, becoming a spirited modern day discussion on how people fool themselves into believing things that don’t really matter, finding themselves awkward and empty, and leading meaningless lives.  Part of being honest is knowing what’s limiting you, what’s wrapping over your true self layer by layer and preventing you from being happier with your life.  In making his 30^th film, Hong’s cinema becomes a process of continuous exploration, a place where questions about existence, art, and human relationships can be addressed, though never resolved.  This tension between the need for understanding and the impossibility of achieving it is what makes Hong’s cinema so deeply human and universal.  In the end, according to the poet, life is short, and we’ll never really discover any of the answers, so it’s important to choose wisely how to fill up the time we have for our lives.  “Maintaining a clear vision might be the hardest thing in the world.”

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).