Quick note: Although the film is listed and screened as two separate parts, they are meant to be experienced as one film, so this serves as a review for both.
Honestly, if you have the cojones to make a movie that’s longer than three hours, as long as I’m not bored, I’ll consider it to be a success. However, not only is Patrick Wang’s new film, A Bread Factory, not boring, but it’s one of the most thrillingly original and fearless films I’ve seen all year. And it manages to keep me effortlessly entertained for its entire four hour runtime.
The first part, subtitled “For the Sake of Gold,” follows a theater director, Dorothea (Tyne Daly), and her actress partner, Greta (Elisabeth Henry), as they find themselves having to save their community arts center (the titular “Bread Factory”) from a possible shut down since the city is planning on giving their share of the educational subsidy to a flashy new space owned by a Chinese avant-garde duo called May Ray. The film has an effortlessly charming and endearing quality to the film, while sustaining a fairly low-key and patient mood and pace. We meet many colorful characters, and it doesn’t take long before you find yourself invested in the struggle to keep the Bread Factory running. There’s so much joy to be found in the various small details that the filmmakers bring to the characters and the town as a whole.
The second part, subtitled “Walk with Me a While,” continues right where the previous part ended. There’s a more even split between the time we share with the various characters we’ve gotten to know, and it builds on the dynamics that have been setup, but it doesn’t necessarily tie them with one overarching plot thread. As an experience, it’s almost an entirely different beast. The eccentric, but mostly grounded sensibilities of the first part are heightened to another level. There’s musical numbers, tap dancing sequences, and moments of surrealism and visual metaphors. Yet, it miraculously doesn’t feel jarring watching it right after the first since the strange new indulgences are all still thematically connected to what was setup in the first. If you were able to get on the distinctively offbeat wavelength of the first part, the stylistic flourishes of the second part won’t be too hard of a pill to swallow.
The whole film feels like a community theater troupe’s dream project, which – in any other context than this – would sound insufferable, but it actually works perfectly for this. It’s very theatrical, it’s choices are quite bold, and more importantly, there’s a deeply earnest love for the arts, to the point of embracing the inherent hokiness that comes with that. So much of the film is very much about the nature of art, the importance of art, about how art can connect with people on a deep level, how we inform it, and how art can bleed into reality, which the film takes very literally at a few points.
The film is beautifully made, but not obviously so. It’s 16mm cinematography and 1.66 : 1 aspect ratio gives the film this warm, nostalgic feeling. There’s a simple elegance to the way cinematographer, Frank Barrera, captures the scenes, be it the intimate moments between Dorothea and Greta, or the big city council meetings, or the stage shows. On top of all that, the performances are top notch across the board. Tyne Daly is wonderful as she typically is, but everyone from Elisabeth Henry-Macari to James Marsters, Nana Visitor, Zachary Sayle, Brian Murray, and many, many others easily hold their own really well, and they are clearly committed to what Wang is going for here.
I think it says a lot that once I was finished with the second part, I would’ve been more than happy to see more of A Bread Factory. Patrick Wang is riding on such a distinct and idiosyncratic wavelength, and once I realized what they were doing, I was fully there for it. A few moments of out-there symbolic gestures did puzzle me, but I was so preoccupied with being impressed by the sheer audacity of what I was witnessing that I simply let the film wash over me. It’s one of the more singular film viewing experiences I’ve had all year, and it’s immediately made Patrick Wang a name to look out for in the future.