Peter Hujar's Day

PETER HUJAR'S DAY   ***

Ira Sachs

2025

IDEA:  On December 19, 1974, journalist Linda Rosenkrantz visits photographer Peter Hujar in his Manhattan apartment and has him recount his previous day in minute detail for an audio recording.

BLURB:  As in many a postmodern work, Peter Hujar’s Day is most fascinating on the conceptual level, in this case as an experiment in archival reconstruction. Sachs’s premise is founded on multiple levels of translation and mediation across media and time: from the spoken words of Hujar and Rosenkrantz as recorded by audiotape in 1974 to a written transcript of the conversation, to a published book of that transcript and then to screenplay, and finally to a visual reenactment in which the words are embodied by actors in a physical space filled with ambient sounds and music. There is at once a documentary consciousness elicited here — the words we’re hearing are the actual words Hujar spoke over 50 years ago — and a pointed artifice, which Sachs underscores through meta-cinematic devices such as camera light leaks that punctuate scenes and, at one point, a sound crew and boom mic in the frame. One could likely just listen to Peter Hujar’s Day, as one could to Derek Jarman’s Blue, and be rewarded by Ben Whishaw’s and Rebecca Hall’s loving embodiments of their subjects’ voices, the way their timbres and cadences resurrect something of the lived experiences of the artists they play. But this is a film, after all, and Sachs fashions lissome images that reveal varied ways of depicting two people in what is essentially one small area. There is a casual dynamism here, from adjustments in blocking, shot scale and length, and movement to the change of light as the day wears on, sun projected on faces and walls in warm 16 mm. The formalism, at times, draws more attention than the words, but they are all of a piece in this wispy but striking film in which the technologies of memory are the very grounds of memory itself. 

Train Dreams

TRAIN DREAMS   ***

Clint Bentley

2025

IDEA:  A logger in the Pacific Northwest experiences love, brutality, and loss over several decades in the 20th century.

BLURB:  Grandness is nestled within the granular in Train Dreams, which conveys the inexorable passage of time and the toll of modernization through the prism of one man’s unexceptional existence. In just about 100 minutes, it channels some 80 years of personal and national history by homing in on the interstices. It’s these in-between moments that comprise the life of Robert Grainier, who drifts on the fringes of the industrial progress to which he contributes but sees little profit from. He’s as rootless as one of his newly felled trees, if not as old; history and nature happen around him, and he can be nothing more than a guilty witness to the former’s sins and a subject of the latter’s indifference. Joel Edgerton is incredibly moving as Grainier, even with the dubious aging makeup (or lack thereof). With his hangdog face and soulful, deep-set eyes, he imbues the character with a painful existential solitude that is in turn heightened by Will Patton’s Godlike narration of his life. But we are always reminded of the splendor in his world, and DP Adolpho Veloso captures it with palpable reverence, his camera gazing up at swaying old-growth trees or soaking in golden sunlight, perched by a warm fireside or showing family play against the yellow-purple hues of dusk. Bentley and Kwedar can’t resist some trite verbalizing of this sublimity, and the life-before-your-eyes montages are laid on rather thick in the final third. Still, Train Dreams is gorgeous and affecting, a requiem for, and hushed acceptance of, the transience of all things. 

The White Balloon

THE WHITE BALLOON   ****

Jafar Panahi

1995

IDEA:  A young girl in Tehran contends with a series of mishaps when she goes to buy a goldfish for the New Year. 

BLURB:  For a film so unassuming and small-scale, The White Balloon stands tall: in Iranian cinema, in child-centered cinema, in the art of nimble, concise yet expansive miniatures that communicate more in a minute than many films do in multiple hours. Every aspect of Kiarostami’s script and Panahi’s direction are precisely judged without once feeling effortful; the same can be said, even more miraculously, of seven-year-old Aida Mohammadkhani, who carries the film on her diminutive shoulders in a performance as large as life. Or as large as a child’s life, anyway, which is to say, huge: every emotion magnified, every step a mile, the simple task of buying a goldfish becoming a quest through a labyrinth of onerous obstacles. Panahi masterfully figures Razieh’s experience of the world through POV shots and subjective sound, expressing the magnitude of how she feels hurt, longing, frustration, curiosity, fear, hope, and so much more. At the same time, he adroitly balances her perspective with a more objective one of the adult reality she finds herself intrepidly navigating. Razieh may not understand it, but Kiarostami and Panahi lucidly show, in an accumulation of small details, a society structured by commerce and inequality, in which a child’s problems are no less important or reflective of that society for being so relatively minor. Her brave negotiations with both adults and youth set into relief the gendered, classed, aged, and ethnic boundaries that affect everyone, and that make the retrieval of a banknote from a sewer grate more than merely a physical challenge. Panahi’s articulation of the economy of urban space and time, his use of color (not for nothing does Razieh visually rhyme with her coveted white-and-orange fish), and his employment of near-constant chatter on the soundtrack come together to create a world bursting with activity, authenticity, and meaning. Even when Razieh accomplishes her mission, Panahi makes sure we know there are so many more to tackle. 

A House of Dynamite

A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE   ***1/2

Kathryn Bigelow

2025

IDEA:  Government officials at all levels scramble to stop a single nuclear missile heading toward the United States.

BLURB:  To use another explosives metaphor, A House of Dynamite is a ticking time bomb that never goes off, a doomsday thriller that holds the audience in a nerve-jangling suspension where the end may be in sight but it can never be (fore)seen. This is an existentialist premise Oppenheim and Bigelow boldly fit inside the trappings of a nuts-and-bolts government procedural, whose ostensible real-time elapsing is subverted through structural repetition. The nonlinear triptych storytelling, more than gradually layering in new perspectives and information, has the simultaneous effect of putting us in the shoes of various agents at a single, hasty moment of heart-racing danger and stretching out that moment into a condition of permanent uncertainty. There are about 20 minutes until possible nuclear armageddon, but there’s also that times three, or the nearly two hours of the film’s runtime, but really there’s an indefinite period of potentiality, and A House of Dynamite makes us queasily sit in it. As she does so well, Bigelow creates suspense through a sense of human control slipping away under our own massive apparatuses of power. Her vérité style, marked by Barry Ackroyd’s handheld camera and Kirk Baxter’s fast cutting, captures basically ordinary people negotiating the minutia of a situation that is anything but ordinary. Oppenheim’s script uses a clichéd shorthand to quickly humanize these people (uniformly by giving them spouses or kids), but it’s mostly bracing in how it conveys the impossibility of their professional decision-making, and the contingencies of bureaucracy, technology, and emotion that influence it. A House of Dynamite leaves us with the chilling reality (or is it insanity?) that our lines of defense are not nearly as powerful as our means of destruction. 

The Stranger

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

THE STRANGER   ***

François Ozon

2025

IDEA:  In late-1930s Algiers, a Frenchman dispassionately murders an Arab man and is put on trial.

BLURB:  Ozon directs his adaptation of Camus’ The Stranger with an icy remoteness verging on sterility. Everything is starchy and obstinate and clinically pristine, from the sun-blasted whites of Manu Dacosse’s B&W cinematography to Benjamin Voisin’s impassive, statuesque figure. In the first half of the film, this affect can be fairly stifling, and perhaps counterintuitive; there are moments when Voisin’s perfectly manicured Meursault is photographed like a matinee idol in a perfume ad rather than an existential enigma (granted, there may be some overlap). But the remove that feels much like lifelessness becomes, appropriately, more charged in the second half. In the pivotal killing that cleaves The Stranger in two, Ozon adds a queer subtext that reframes the story in compelling ways. Cornering the recumbent Arab, Meursault looks at the man's exposed armpit in a POV shot before he is blinded by the glare of his phallic knife in another; the scene links Meursault to a repressed homoeroticism that is metonymically doubled by his country’s repression of the ethnic Other. Does Meursault have an unconscious desire and/or empathy for the Arab, seeing in his social marginalization a mirror of his own “strangeness,” and thus reaffirming the absurdity of the colonial apparatus? Ozon makes this a possibility, and if it potentially undercuts some of the stoic apathy in Camus, it offers new avenues for reading a character and a story that have been exhaustively pored over. This version of The Stranger still ends up in the embrace of the world’s gentle indifference, anyway, and then, in a surprising revisionist coda, at the site where that indifference is most soberingly evident.

Strange River

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

STRANGE RIVER   ***1/2

Jaume Claret Muxart

2025

IDEA:  On a summer trip with his family in Germany, the teenaged Dídac is drawn to a mysterious boy he encounters in the water.

BLURB:  Jan Monter, the young lead actor of Strange River, has the perfect face for such a cryptic and bewitching film. With his sphinx-like mien and wide azure eyes that are less like windows than frosted glass, he entrances the camera with an alluring unknowability. It is the unknowability of a teenager to his parents, but also maybe to himself, to desires and fears that have yet to autonomously crystallize outside the safety of the family unit. For Jan Monter’s Dídac, still waters run deep, and for Jaume Claret Muxart, in his feature directorial debut, bodies of water carry timeworn connotations of life, death, eroticism, and irrationality. While hardly reinventing the tropes of the summer coming-of-age tale, Strange River captivates from its shimmeringly sensual surface to the hints of its quivering undercurrents. Pablo Paloma’s 16 mm cinematography is a thing of immaculate jewel-like beauty, radiant with estival greens and blues and lightly sunburned skin. In becalmed long takes, landscapes and bodies are rendered with tactile presence, as in the engulfing depths of the river or the goose-bumpy flesh of a boy swimming right up against the camera. At the same time, Strange River is an abstraction, an otherworldly dance of moonlit ripples and twink(ly) apparitions taking place in a liminal zone. Muxart gives us just enough narrative shading to make sense of the sullen Dídac, prone to sudden breakdowns, and to grasp the precarious balance of his family, his relationship toward parents and especially brothers from whom he’s awkwardly growing apart. But the tender, laconic Strange River’s primary language is visual and corporeal, expressing itself in glances and breaths and a prominent hickey, still ruddy and fresh.

Sound of Falling

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

SOUND OF FALLING   ***1/2

Mascha Schilinski

2025

IDEA:  The lives of four generations of women are glimpsed across nearly a century in and around a farmhouse estate in east Germany.

BLURB:  Sound of Falling is a mighty, forbidding cataract of densely woven visuals and soundscapes as likely to leave one awed as flummoxed. Despite its periodization, it doesn’t so much narrate a history of reverberating domestic terrors as impressionistically embody their affects, which, perhaps, escape narrativization. Floating across time, inhabiting multiple points of view (including, often, a conspicuous 8 mm camera gaze), and slipping through an indistinguishable mesh of reality, memory, and imagination, Sound of Falling conducts an excavation of sedimented psychic pain in which all that can be recovered are the ghostly traces. With the source of trauma never seen or understood — obscured as it is by the inchoate, restricted POVs of the young female protagonists and the silence of their elders — Schilinski offers up strange, looping audiovisual effusions that suggest what can’t be made visible. These have a chilling, Gothic dream logic: a pale blonde girl clad in black, recreating an old photo of an identical forebear sitting limp on a sofa beside a pair of dolls; a lamprey clamping down between a woman’s index finger and thumb; all the titular falling, into rivers and on barn floors, accompanied by crackling vinyl (or film projector?) sounds. Schilinski refuses to moor us in this seething transhistorical miasma, even as we sometimes hear characters in voiceover poetically give shape to their thoughts and feelings (“It’s funny how something can hurt when it’s not there anymore”). This excessive fragmentation can make it a trying task to keep track of or even identify characters, timelines, and events. Surely, as well, this is part of Schilinski’s design, a deliberately discombobulating invocation of affects that seep across temporal boundaries and take ahold of you, like a woman who can’t control her smile (or gag reflex), with involuntary power.