A Bread Factory Parts One and Two (2018) Epic art-world comedy (Review)

You wait ages for a two-part independent film about making art, and then – aptly enough – two come at once. Following on from Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Parts I and II, Bulldog distribution are releasing Patrick Wang’s A Bread Factory Parts One and Two. These films were originally released in the United States in 2018 but they’re getting their first UK release now, along with Wang’s other features The Grief of Others and In the Family. We’ll be talking more about those when they’re released on VoD in March, but there’s no doubt A Bread Factory is the main event if only in terms of pure scale. 

The two films are arranged loosely around Dorothea and Greta, played by Tyne Daly and Elisabeth Henry respectively. They’re an old married couple who run a local arts centre – the Bread Factory of the title – in a fictional borough of New York. Greta and Dorothea are in constant competition with another, rather more successful, arts centre across town, and Part One – subtitled For the Sake of Gold – concerns their battle to prevent the town’s arts education budget being siphoned off to fund that other institution.

All the fun of local politics on paper, then, but Wang has a surprising array of strategies up his sleeve when it comes to dramatising this. At the start of For the Sake of Gold, the rival arts centre is putting on a major event featuring the celebrated international performance artists May Ray, who are depicted as a barbed parody of Marina Abramovic and Ulay. As they sit opposite each other chanting “Down with the hierarchy of furniture!”, we realise this film is going to be far funnier than a four-hour epic about the intricacies of municipal arts funding has any right to be. The films stray across a number of genres – Part Two, subtitled Walk With Me a While, is something close to a full-on musical – but comedy seems to be Wang’s lodestar, the artistic mode he keeps coming back to. 

It’s interestingly hard to pin down what kind of comedy A Bread Factory is. The scenes with May Ray, as well as several of the visitors from the film world, tend towards acid parody, but the overall mood is too low-key and naturalistic to be a spoof or a farce. The deadpan tone, as well as the mosaic-like construction of the narrative, suggests the influence of Roy Andersson. Yet there is nothing like the sudden eruptions of surrealism that mark out Andersson’s work. Even the musical numbers in Walk With Me a While turn out to be carefully bedded into the film’s universe. For the Sake of Gold has a subtle fourth-wall break near the end, followed by a very funny end credits song by Chip Taylor about how long the end credits are. In retrospect, these moments prepare the ground for the first musical number in Walk With Me a While, and once the film’s Greek chorus has been established they casually drift in and out of the narrative in exactly the same way that all the other characters do. 

The phrase “Greek chorus” is appropriate, since Walk With Me a While focuses on the Bread Factory rehearsing a Greek tragedy, Hecuba, from which the first film’s subtitle is taken. I have to admit to finding this plot less urgent than For the Sake of Gold’s hunt for funding, and if you don’t have time for all four hours of Wang’s vision I’d say For the Sake of Gold holds up very well as a stand-alone film. But Walk With Me a While still does its job in deepening and complicating the characters we’ve seen in the previous film. It also has one of the most emotional plot lines in either film, as a local waitress called Teresa (Jessica Pimintel) dares to go on stage for the first time and discovers her ability to act. 

If a pair of films this sprawling can be boiled down to a simple moral, this is it: a local, community arts centre serves the ordinary members of its community in ways the vain, celebrity-driven art of May Ray never could. But Wang uses the space he’s given to himself to explore other, less positive aspects of being part of a local arts scene. In For the Sake of Gold, there’s a scene where aspiring arts journalist Max, played by Zachary Sale, is interviewing a veteran critic in a cafe. Max notices one of the cafe’s other patrons is glaring at the critic, and he asks why. It turns out the glaring man is an actor the critic gave a bad review to several decades ago, and he still holds a grudge. The critic seems to accept this as part of his job, but it’s hard not to feel for the actor. One bad review can hang in the air when you live alongside the assassin of your career for so many years. It’s a problem that, judging by these remarkably confident, original films, Patrick Wang will never have. 

Graham’s archive – A BREAD FACTORY (2018) part one & two