A Bread Factory-Part One

A Bread Factory-Part One

[Editor’s Note: The following is a review of Part One of A Bread Factory, a two-part film about an arts center in a small upstate New York town. Each part can be seen independently, but they are designed to be watched together. Read the Part Two review here.]

Patrick Wang’s “A Bread Factory Part One: For the Sake of Gold” is half of a matched set of movies that represents the most singular moviegoing experience I had this year. Part Two is subtitled “Walk With Me a While.” Each runs 120 minutes; the halves are meant to show back to back with an intermission in between, but you can see them separately and feel as though you’ve seen an entire work.

Watch it any way you like “A Bread Factory” is a deliriously ambitious yet humble epic about a place and its people, written, directed and acted with the spirit of Robert Altman (“Nashville”), Richard Linklater (“Bernie”) and Edward Yang (“Yi Yi”) muralists who paint on wide canvases but still treat every character like someone deserving their own portrait.

Part One introduces us to Checkford, N.Y., which might as well be Grover’s Corners or Maycomb or Deadwood for how vividly it comes alive. The bread factory itself serves as headquarters for an arts center that Dorothea (Tyne Daly) and her partner Greta (Elizabeth Henry) have run since its conversion 40 years ago. She’s a no-nonsense administrator and stage director with a fierce passion for theater; she doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Her partner Greta is Finnish-born; she moved to the United States from Helsinki years ago because she fell in love with Dorothea while seeing her perform here.

Lately there have been more occasions where Greta tries furtively to keep Dorothea from losing her temper.

Just across town, a flashier arts facility has been built. It traffics in gaudy and superficial work that’s steeped in the cliches of 1990s conceptual art, shuts down the brain rather than engaging it, and seems designed to bring in tourists who will go home with tote bags and T-shirts. Most of this is created or approved by a couple of gimmicky Chinese performance artists turned multinational brand named May Ray (Janet Hsieh and George Young).

May Ray pipe prerecorded laughter and applause through P.A. systems to override the crowd’s response; they wear outrageous costumes (at one point we see them in retro spacesuits with tiny action figure versions of themselves hanging right in front of their face plates); they are their own logos, branding everything they touch.

They like to draw the audience into cutesy stunts (like “walking in another person’s shoes,” which are made from hats) that provide momentary thrills or laughs and then serve up banalities disguised as wisdom (like “stumbling is part of walking”) so that patrons leave not only knowing that they’ve witnessed Real Art but what it was supposed to mean. In contrast, The Bread Factory books some out of towners and an occasional big name but is primarily powered by local work steeped in a classical liberal arts tradition works created by local artists for local audiences in a relationship that remains reciprocal and open-ended, an exchange of traditions and values.

Dorothea and Greta discover that the city wants to take away their subsidy for education which is what allows them to teach Chatford’s kids (thus training a new generation of artists and patrons), provides the core of their monthly nut, and gives them something to do all day besides sit in the empty Bread Factory crying and give it to the newbies, who outstrip them in everything but parking. Suddenly they have to think like generals, coming up with a plan that will persuade more than half of the city council not to change anything.

The new facility’s administrator, Karl (Trevor St. John), is a middle manager type who seems calm and bland but is actually smart and ruthless; he has shady funding connections and appears to have already bought off half the school board. He even tries to strong-arm Dorothea into backing down from the impending board fight by threatening to report The Bread Factory to the state for hiring a felon (albeit one whose conviction was reversed) and employing children (actually teenagers volunteering as interns who are being thoughtfully mentored by adult staff).

This could be interminable if Wang didn’t care so much about his characters’ fears, resentments, hopes, triumphs, doubts, insecurities, delusions of grandeur; if he wasn’t so invested in seeing how they process information differently depending on whether they’re doing theater or politicking or just hanging around drinking coffee at Sam’s cafe while waiting for another retirement age journalist named Jan (Glynnis O’Connor) shows up with her camera and notebook and says she has an ethical obligation as an independent Fourth Estate citizen journalist working out of a basement office across town from The Chatford Sentinel’s new headquarters in Starpointe Mall “to shine daylight on this place. I mean if we can’t trust God, then whom can we trust?”

Also: If every line didn’t build toward Wang’s grand design for a cinematic symphony about the way we create and consume art, information, community; if he didn’t know how to make us curious about Elsa’s background (why does she have Dorothea’s number?), or Jan’s (how did she end up both editing and writing The Chatford Sentinel?), or Max’s (is he in love with Julie, too? what is it about this library assistant who’d be perfect casting as Hecuba but can’t remember her lines?), or Karl’s (who is his contact on the school board? why does Dorothea bring up Chicago?).

“A Bread Factory” touches on many things. One of these is the difficulty of thriving as an artist in a market-driven society if you have knowledge, passion, a dedicated fanbase and no money or connections, and a refusal to self-promote beyond letting the work speak for itself. The two facilities’ David-and-Goliath struggle recalls the rivalry between Italian restaurants in the ‘50s set American comedy “Big Night.”

On one side is the showboat joint where people get what they expect: spaghetti & meatballs in red sauce, checkered tablecloths, accordion music and bursts of sudden flame. The other serves Northern Italian cuisine unknown to Americans of the 1950s; it’s cooked by an unyielding chef who wants each customer to be surprised and feel somewhere real who’d rather sulk alone in his kitchen than entertain. Guess which one makes money?

“A Bread Factory” is more than anything else an idealistic declaration of the importance of art in everyday life. This means that a play or even just a poem can put a new frame around your life through your dreams and problems, or perhaps shine a light on them, along with your community, this country and the culture that shaped you. What frustrates Dorothea her frustration so brilliantly expressed by Daly, who gives what can only be described as a typical great performance from her is having to explain all this at all. She’s old enough to remember when Americans believed art was their birthright no matter their social status; when they understood that it is like well-funded public schools for any advanced democracy.

The artists in the film are also teachers because they know if they don’t make some aspect of their work exciting or lovely for at least one person among those watching it and nobody else will do such thing for them then we are lost because unless we keep reaching out to these younger generations and helping them understand why living by thinking is important, art cannot survive within an increasingly corporatized existence.

A sour-hearted indie filmmaker named Jordan (Janeane Garofalo) sets up this dynamic very early on in the movie when she comes into town with her latest film under one arm and hate in both eyes, screening it at The Bread Factory. She can’t stand adults asking boring questions like “what was your budget?” but lights up when she’s teaching kids so much so that one of her students goes home and chews his mother out for not cooking chicken like she means it after hearing Jordan rant about passion being everything in art.

What really drives scenes between Dorothea Greta Karl May Ray though has less to do with making money off creative labour (though that’s always there somewhere) or selling oneself short as an artist because capital demands every product look packaged and presented by rock star entrepreneurs even if temperament isn’t suited for such things; what these moments reveal is how much post-war American tradition has allowed public funding of art and education to wither over past thirty years so that now when many people hear word “art” they think decadence indulgence or thing taxes shouldn’t fund.

“You must’ve seen hard times before,” a board member tells Dorothea. “Honestly?” she replies. “I’ve never seen this bad.” Jean-Marc shares her pessimism: “They once baked bread here,” he says of the arts facility, “but now we live in an age where all life’s crumbs.” Then adds: “what they make from these crumbs is miraculous and we’re lucky have them.”

It’s my favorite film of the year singular, because the two halves of “A Bread Factory” flow together in my mind. I’ve watched each part three times at time of writing and on every occasion noticed something different as well as become more emotionally involved with characters who are eccentric like real people but written & acted with economy/directness that suggests good short stories or plays where tellers know what they want say how it should be said.

It’s a long movie with two more hours in Part Two if you’ve got the time but nothing feels extraneous once you get on its wave. The narrative keeps moving even when it seems like the movie is pausing to show us a piece of someone’s art. Notice that the poet reads right after a scene that makes Dorothea fear for the Bread Factory, which has been around for four decades. The first poem is about a redwood, an ancient, powerful ever growing thing.

The second is from the point of view of someone whose gondola sank to the bottom of a Venice canal. Maybe Dorothea, who introduced the poet, sits up there in the audience and hears those two poems one reverent, one despairing in her life.

I will say off top: This ain’t no film (or pair of films) you can half-watch while looking at your phone. Wang takes his sweet time setting up moments; punchlines in comedic scenes are just as likely to be visual as verbal. You gotta lean into it with your full story body spirit self and be okay with being thrown into scenes midway through without knowing who everybody is or what exactly you’re looking at. To quote my minister film buff friend: “This a Mohammed goes to the mountain movie.” It’s worth going on this journey. This film is miraculous and we’re lucky to have it.

Watch A Bread Factory-Part One For Free On Gomovies.