Yapping is so back.
That was my takeaway at least, watching three talkies in quick succession at last week’s Berlin International Film Festival. Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon and Korean auteur Hong Sang-Soo's What Does That Nature Say, as well as Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day (a Sundance hit that screened as part of the Berlinale’s Panorama section) made a convincing case that we’re experiencing the return of the hangout movie, a sub-genre coined by Quentin Tarantino to describe films where characters and dialogue take precedence over plot.
The New Yorker’s Larissa MacFarquhar paraphrases the director expounding on the subject in this classic 2003 New Yorker profile: “[These are] movies whose plot and camerawork you may admire but whose primary attraction is the characters. A hangout movie is one that you watch over and over again, just to spend time with them.”
(Pulp Fiction, for example, is not a hangout movie. But Jackie Brown, Tarantino’s underrated 1997 joint starring Pam Grier and filled with dive bars and characters one puff away from resignation? That’s a candidate. “Every two or three years, put in Jackie Brown again, and you’re drinking white wine with Jackie, and drinking screwdrivers with Ordell, and taking bong hits with Melanie and Louis,” Tarantino says.)
By that standard, Linklater is perhaps the master of the form. He’s made a whole career out of the hangout, from Dazed and Confused to the Before trilogy to Boyhood. His latest film, a character sketch of Lorenz Hart—one-half of Rodgers and Hart, the storied songwriting duo behind classics like “My Funny Valentine”—is no different, a melancholic ode to the songwriter that once again proves Linklater’s fluency with the form.
Blue Moon finds the bisexual, alcoholic Hart, played by Ethan Hawke, in ruins, reeling from the triumphant opening night of Oklahoma!, the first great success of Rodgers and Hammerstein—his former collaborator Richard Rodgers’ new partnership. Still, he makes his way to Sardi’s anyway, to join Rodgers, Hammerstein and their various supporters, to toast the show’s success.
Talking mile a minute, at turns morose and braggadocious, Hawke’s Hart spends most of the film holding anyone who would listen to him hostage—from Bobby Canavale’s loyal bartender to Andrew Scott’s Rodgers, who regards Hart with equal parts pity and impatience—pontificating on everything from his gay reading of Casablanca’s ending (Rick and Louis truthers, we been knew) to his one-sided, mostly imagined love affair with the fresh-faced Elizabeth, played by Margaret Qualley, a 20-year-old who seems to represent a kind of return to innocence for a man who is, as he puts it, in the “‘for worse’ part” of “for better or for worse.” A funny valentine, indeed.
Nothing much happens in Blue Moon, but the emotional stakes are high anyway, with Hawke in top form, grasping at straws, talking to convince anyone (but mostly himself) that there’s life in him yet, grappling with the feeling that the time for doing something has passed.
Another master of the hangout movie is the Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-Soo, an auteur whose films are distinguished not just by his quiet, decidedly low-budget storytelling and deeply considered views on the artist’s life, but also by their willingness to show humans at their most primal—running their mouths while drinking copious amounts of booze at the dining table.
His latest film, What Does That Nature Say, is about a budding young poet who initially plans to drop off his girlfriend at her parents’ house, only to find himself spending a long day of meals and libations with her family. He spends most of that day talking to them about his philosophies in life—much to the amusement of her sneakily wise parents. The prolific Hong, who churns out these gems annually—sometimes twice or even thrice in a year—is playing on home court here, gloriously playing with elements he’s long mastered in a film that, amusingly, plays like a riff on Meet the Parents.
Still, it’s Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day that feels like the most audacious take on the hangout film. Recreating a 1974 interview between the photographer Peter Hujar (played by Ben Whishaw) and his friend Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), a journalist who was working on a book about how artists spend their days, Sachs sticks about as close as cinematically possible to the transcript—a decision that initially feels baffling but later reveals itself to have its own quiet, hypnotic power.
Mundane by design, Peter Hujar’s Day has no real plot and no exposition. The closest we get to an action scene is a few minutes of Whishaw and Hall dancing around the dining table to Tennessee Jim’s “Hold Me Tight.” Mostly, Hujar just talks—about chasing checks from magazines and the rising costs of cigarettes, William Burroughs’ predilection for pretty prep school boys and Susan Sontag elegantly turning down a magazine commission. We get his thoughts on Joan Crawford, coffee cups, how many naps are too many, and the musical exploits of downtown fixture (and future GQ Style Guy) Glenn O’Brien. This is one of those films where you really can trust the title—this is Peter Hujar talking about his day.
But in training his lens on the small hours of our lives, Sachs conveys something profound about life, friendship and creating art. “Nothing much happens,” Hujar says at one point. “I wasted a day.”
“I myself feel like I do nothing all day,” Rosenkratz agrees, it’s the very reason she started this project in the first place.
But it’s those small hours where life is most lived—it’s in those small wins, those daily frustrations where life accrues. And in Hujar’s case, where a legend is made. As Hujar tells Rosenkrantz at one point: “They were good but they were ordinary.” In this way, Peter Hujar’s Day—and Blue Moon—does the traditional biopic one better. Instead of attempting to capture a cradle-to-grave narrative in two hours, it drops us into a relatively mundane day in an icon’s life to give us something more elusive: a mellow hang.
Often, we want life to feel like a movie; here, Sachs has given us a movie that feels like life.