Courtesy of Late Film LLC.

Courtesy of Janus Films.

New York Film Festival 2025:

Late Fame
Peter Hujar’s Day

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Kent Jones
Directed by Ira Sachs

One of the presumably unintentional but noticeable trends that arose during the first week of the 63rd New York Film Festival’s press screenings was a consideration of art’s place in the world, often accompanied by an aesthetic that might be said to constitute a throwback. Films like Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent and Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, which utilized thriller elements in tandem with a tumultuous ’70s backdrop, also featured extended meditations on how the experience of cinema and painting, respectively, can capture the spirit of then-modern sociopolitical currents. Two other films took 1970s artistry as their main subject: Kent Jones’s Late Fame and Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day.

Though my familiarity with their work is roughly equal—both films are the second I’ve seen by their respective directors—and they belong to the same generation of Americans, the two filmmakers couldn’t be more dissimilar. Anyone who came to cinephilia in the past few years could be forgiven for not knowing the name Kent Jones, but there’s little excuse for anyone even remotely plugged into American film culture before then, considering his work as a longtime film critic—I routinely cite his piece on John Ford for Film Comment as one of my favorite articles of criticism—archivist (including for Martin Scorsese), and, most pertinently, director of the New York Film Festival for a surprisingly abbreviated term from 2013 to 2019. Though that span of time may be too short and recent to accurately judge, his tenure, especially considering Dennis Lim’s continual presence on the selection committee during that time, certainly helped usher along NYFF’s evolution into an ever more open and exploratory festival. In terms of his own filmmaking, Jones has already made a number of documentaries, and his fiction feature debut Diane (2018), a somber consideration of a woman near the end of her life, led him to leave film programming behind to make directing his main pursuit.

Ironically, I’m less familiar with Sachs: despite being five years Jones’s junior, he has already made nine features, starting with The Delta (1997). A mainstay of Sundance, with such celebrated works as Married Life (2007) and Love Is Strange (2014), along with a Cannes competition berth with the Isabelle Huppert-starring Frankie (2019), he had something of an unexpected mid-career resurgence with Passages, the only other film of his I’ve seen so far. A seemingly more overtly sensual work starring three of Europe’s most celebrated arthouse actors in Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, and Adéle Exarchopoulos, it drew a seemingly larger than usual audience with its frank depiction of a queer love triangle inextricable from its apex’s bad behavior and badder outfits.

Both Late Fame and Peter Hujar’s Day, then, come as something of a pivot for both filmmakers. While the latter premiered, as usual, all the way back in Sundance—bypassing its predecessor’s summer MUBI release for this late but fitting New York fall festival spot—the former, contra the prior film’s Tribeca premiere, bowed in the Venice Orizzonti competition, an unexpected but deserved berth for an American independent film. The star is far more recognizable this time: Willem Dafoe plays the incongruously named Ed Saxberger, a poet of some minor renown in the late 1970s who works in today’s New York City as a post office employee, having settled into a comfortable routine of sorting letters and hanging out with barflies unaware of his past life. One day, he encounters Wilson Meyers (Edmund Donovan), the de facto leader of a young literary group known as the Enthusiasm Society, who has staked out his apartment and, over the course of a few effusive meetings, expresses his admiration for the erstwhile poet and asks him to join the society. As they gear up for a statement event and Saxberger attempts to write for the first time in decades, he draws closer to Gloria (Greta Lee), the only female member of the group, whose commitment to her acting aspirations and exaggerated mannerisms set her apart from the would-be mavericks.

Unlike Diane, Jones didn’t write the script for Late Fame, which was already penned by May December scribe Samy Burch, adapted to a modern American setting from Arthur Schnitzler’s novella. Though I had completely forgotten about this fact before the closing credits—and the screenplay doesn’t try to match the fiendish machinations on display in Todd Haynes’s film—it goes some ways in accounting for the renewed sense of relaxation that suffuses this film. From the opening montage, a stream of late-’70s New York avant-garde images that suggest the milieu in which Saxberger briefly practiced his craft, it is clear that Jones is interested in a much larger sense of place than the snowy woods of his previous film, and he takes care to recognize its hustle and bustle while also finding room for his hero’s own, more sanguine experience. The camera is wilder in its greater commitment to handheld, often used in tandem with rapid cutting during some of the larger group scenes, where a split-second shot of a minor member’s smirk adds to the viewer’s (and Saxberger’s) confusion while trying to understand his newfound milieu. In between these dialogue-heavy sequences, there are occasionally some lovely, rapid dissolves of the skies of New York, occupied by birds and buildings, which suggest Saxberger taking the temperature of his assumed home, a poetic mind still at work even as the form has fallen away.

Late Fame is, above all else, an often thrillingly imperfect film, one more open to the possibilities of total failure than Jones’s last film. From the inherent critique of these pretenders to the literary throne—the camera noticeably locks down for a few searing scenes that capture Meyers’s and his associates’ wealth—to Lee’s performance, which is so stylized and self-consciously that the expected reveal of her in a “normal” guise still carries a certain charge, the film risks being insular and even mean-spirited in its takedown of privileged posers, especially as the planned reading spirals further out of control. But it is all united under Dafoe, as warm and playfully rueful as he’s ever been, a force of calm in the midst of the chaos of his peers and his city. Crucially, though his poem is quite good (to my ears) and he does enjoy being feted, Saxberger, and therefore the film that he anchors, is free to slip in and out of these different modes; some are more successfully handled than others, but the lightness of its aging spirit is often unexpected and welcome.

Despite opening with the same camera slate opening as Passages, Peter Hujar’s Day is even more of a left turn for Sachs. Unlike Late Fame‘s fictional poet (but real poetry scene), the film takes not only real people but a very specific occurrence as its subject: in December 1974, writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) attempted to embark on a project where she would record artists she knew talking in minute detail about the events of their previous day. For her first and only entry—as laid out in intertitles at the beginning of the film—she chose Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw), a semi-prominent photographer; though the tape was subsequently lost, a transcript was retained, the contents of which provided the basis for this 76-minute film.

At first glance, Peter Hujar’s Day might seem even more self-satisfied, a 16mm-shot recounting of a fairly banal day in the life of a long-gone New York artist, with an extended anecdote about photographing Allen Ginsberg and stray references to Susan Sontag as perhaps the most readily discernible signposts to the average viewer. But though I can’t recall the precise wording of those title cards, they gesture towards what becomes compelling, even moving about this film. Because the transcript presumably contains no details as to the timespan of the recording, nor what may have transpired between its gaps, the film thus registers as a hybrid between audio reenactment of a documented event and an opportunity to imagine intimate, symbiotic actions of speaking and listening, full of little digressions, snacking, and movements between Rosenkrantz’s apartment and the building’s roof.

Sachs evokes this not only with a precision of framing within the Academy ratio frame, but also by constantly highlighting the inherently constructed nature of this production. Some are a bit more gratuitous than others—a recurring use of film rollouts, a few long shots where the slate and boom mic are visible, a handful of montages where preexisting music swells as Whishaw and Hall appear in poised repose—but they provide continual punctuation that remind the viewer of the work that must go into recreating Hujar’s attempt to recall his own past day. The film even appears to take place over the span of a few days, with a full day-night-day-night cycle, suggesting that to simply talk about one’s day in any detail at all itself takes more time than it does to live it. There, then is the crux of Peter Hujar’s Day‘s raison d’être: given that Hujar’s own recounting of his previous day’s happenings is inherently colored by his own perspective and the inevitable lapses in concentration and memory, the film is thus an imagining of a real event’s imagining of real events. That this all does not take away from the pleasures of existing in a long-gone artistic climate and of watching a gifted actor speaking and another strong actor intently listening is, in its own knowingly small way, more than a little impressive.

Courtesy of Sideshow/Janus Films.

Courtesy of MUBI.

Misericordia/Miséricorde

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Alain Guiraudie

Grand Tour

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Miguel Gomes

I sometimes worry that my habit of writing about two new releases together—stolen, like the credits/ratings block immediately above, from Jonathan Rosenbaum—can feel like a crutch. True, it can sometimes provide a productive, logical point of comparison, and just as often it can come as something of a challenge. But in this instance, it’s meant, at least at the outset, as a means of saving time, of allowing me to write at length about two of my favorite films of the decade thus far without needing to shortchange one or the other by “consigning” it to a capsule review, or taking even longer than I already have in my delayed writing and publication of what you’re reading now. Of course, this very act of combination could be seen as an implicit denigration, meaning that the films either aren’t worth my time and effort to tackle individually or that they can’t stand up by themselves. That (I hope) incorrect assumption is something I’m willing to risk, for the sake of various other competing obligations (for this website and in the actually “important” things in the “real world”).

That being said, the more I think about these two films, the more parallels present themselves. In an earlier, embryonic version of this piece concerned solely with the first film, I noted that from my vantage point, the early to mid-2010s seemed like an unusual time period, full of filmmakers who established themselves with what appeared to be a breakthrough hit; some of them have gone on to become part of what might be considered the film festival mainstay, while others have receded in visibility within the American cinephile consciousness for one reason or another. Alain Guiraudie seems to me the clearest and most understandable example, given the particular confluence of thriller mechanics, frank gay sexuality, and rigorous form offered by 2013’s Stranger by the Lake. However, Miguel Gomes isn’t far behind, even though 2012’s Tabu ultimately had a marginally smaller footprint when it was released. Both continue to operate as statements, even milestones, pure expressions of fated desire as filtered through Guiraudie’s stunningly casual treatment of cruising within precise, locked-down frames and Gomes’s two-part, black-and-white meditation on colonialism present and past, eventually slipping into his own unique take on silent cinema.

Guiraudie and Gomes have each released two feature film projects within a year of each other since then, neither to close the same fanfare. The former’s case is perhaps more banal: Staying Vertical, despite a surprise Cannes competition berth, was too willfully weird to attract a wide audience, and Nobody’s Hero, despite its considerable strengths, was doomed by a reluctant festival rollout and risky treatment of its terrorism backdrop. Gomes, for his part, went both bigger and smaller: the ambitious three-part epic Arabian Nights, all components of which premiered at the same time, was destined to confuse listmakers and cinephiles alike, while the lowkey lockdown film The Tsugua Diaries (co-directed with his artistic and life partner Maureen Fazendeiro) was a minor work by its very nature.

At last year’s Cannes, Guiraudie and Gomes took unexpected paths towards some semblance of critical acclaim. The French director’s Misericordia bowed in the non-competitive Cannes Premiere section, a post-COVID addition widely perceived as a backhanded compliment and tertiary tier of programming amid the main selection, generating nearly as many comments expressing disbelief that it was not in Competition as Víctor Erice’s Close Your Eyes and Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka from the previous year put together. For his part, the Portuguese director did appear in Cannes Competition for the first time with Grand Tour, winning an unexpected yet very well-deserved Best Director prize from the jury. In the usual fashion, they both received US theatrical releases earlier this year, coming out in back-to-back weeks in March.

Much of the (separate) discussion around these two films has hinged around a crucial concept: a filmmaker knowingly revisiting the style of his past works, whether to recapture something of a past glory or not. Both Misericordia and Grand Tour seem to call back specifically to Stranger by the Lake and Tabu, respectively, and it’s certainly no accident that these somewhat more palatable modes have been received as something of a return to form. Guiraudie’s film does indeed return to the openly queer murder mystery framework, while Gomes issued another bifurcated black-and-white tale of thwarted colonialist romance conveyed through archaic cinematic methods. But to reduce these two films, and their elaborations upon past successes, is to risk taking two master filmmakers for granted, even considering their recent reemergence into the wider cinephile consciousness.

As might be inferred by my shorter enumeration, Misericordia shares less in common with Guiraudie’s past work than Grand Tour does with Gomes’s. Like those films, however, it begins fully in media res, a long winding opening shot from the perspective of a car that eventually enters Saint-Martial, a remote village in the French countryside. The driver is Jérèmie (Félix Kysyl), a young man returning to his hometown on the occasion of his baker mentor’s funeral. Though he initially plans to leave that same night, the baker’s wife Martine (Catherine Frot) urges him to stay, and so begins an indefinite period of time spent in the company of the local villagers, including Martine’s son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), former acquaintance Walter (David Ayala), and the local priest (Jacques Develay).

Though the aforementioned violence does occur remarkably early and acts as the nominal plot engine for Misericordia‘s second two-thirds, Guiraudie establishes early on that there is much more on his mind than another tale of a h(a)unted man. The most immediate impression is of a specific, unusual sense of routine within an environ that is—to Jérèmie at least—both old and new. He is frequently seen walking in the yellowing forests from the relatively few locations that constitute the bulk of the film’s centers of activity, a purely beautiful backdrop of foliage and mountains (captured by Guiraudie’s frequent collaborator Claire Mathon) that often dwarfs Jérèmie and those he interacts with. Across innumerable glasses of pastis, several physical and/or verbal fights of varying levels of intensity, and various criss-crossing attractions (mostly between men), the interplay between the expansive outdoors and cramped interiors comes to form an odd mirror for the situation that Jérèmie has found himself in.

As his moral struggle increases in prominence, so too does the priest’s role, in a manner not dissimilar from the lonely straight man played by Patrick d’Assumçao in Stranger by the Lake. Aside from some chance interactions, the intertwining of Jérèmie and the priest truly begins with one of the most remarkable scenes to ever take place in a confessional, an veiled outpouring of dedication and doubt that bursts open Guiruadie’s carefully couched conversations. Though the film’s title—Latin for mercy—is never uttered onscreen, this scene and another between the two men on a cliff overlooking the village communicate in unexpectedly forthright terms all that goes into such a concept, which involves forgiveness of both the other and the self. With these elements coming to form the more thematic framework, Misericordia is able to also incorporate characters and narratives closer to farce, including a pair of dogged yet polite police officers whose presence only further muddies the waters of Guiraudie’s characteristically slippery relationship between reality and dreams. The final note is one of total ambiguity, an unexpected note given to an unexpected person that refuses any hint of finality, one final gambit in a continual highwire act between hilarity, suspense, and heartrending emotion.

If Misericordia only gets more fascinating as it unfolds, Grand Tour is a marvel from its production concept alone. It is composed of what might be considered two separate tendencies: the narrative, which follows the story of a British civil servant (Edward, played by Gonçalo Waddington) who flees across Asia in the year 1918, pursued by his betrothed Molly (Crista Alfaite), which is told from first his perspective, then hers on obvious soundstages in Portugal shot in black-and-white by Rui Poças; and the non-narrative, which incorporates black-and-white and color footage shot in modern times with no attempts to hide the century-long gap between the diegesis of the story and the new aspects of the present; much of it was shot by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, but the sections in China were shot (due to lockdown protocol) by Gui Liang, with Gomes directing remotely from across the country.

Over all of this, there is narration given by unnamed voices who speak in the language of the country Edward, then Molly is in at the time, and it is this wild collision of voices and past and present that gives Grand Tour so much of its spark. It is crucial that Gomes does not attempt to disguise what many have already characterized as an excessively Orientalist lens. There is never any point at which the film is unaware of the distance that exists between it and everything it is depicting: the gap in time between it and the Western characters, and the gap in perspective between it and the locales it is existing within. Like Molly’s continual pursuit of Edward, there is the constant sense of searching, during which Gomes’s unique methodology allows him to open up the film to the possibility of experiencing all that the world has to offer.

That being said, Grand Tour wouldn’t be as successful if Gomes lacked an investment in the central dynamic. Part of this is courtesy of the sneakily coherent structure of his screenplay (co-written with Fazendeiro, Telmo Churro, and Mariana Ricardo), which progresses rapidly through Edward’s hapless travails and then diverges from them during Molly’s retracing of his steps, throwing in additional characters which complicate and delay her quest in unexpected, often amusing ways. It also becomes clear that the ardor and care with which Gomes captures both halves of the twinned journeys form a metonym for the passion that Molly has for Edward despite his parting; Alfaite’s performance, full of exuberance and bemused determination, seems to represent Gomes’s perspective better than the shambling Waddington. By the end, which feels like a grand Classical Hollywood exit, the sights and sounds that the viewer experiences alongside these two people are overpowering, a reminder of all that remains to be seen.