Kritiken

To some extent, Patrick Wang’s dazzling two-part, four-hour comedy A Bread Factory (2018)—shot over twenty-four days in Hudson, New York, after ten days of rehearsal with well over sixty professional or semiprofessional actors—is an epic anthology of performance art. . . . What makes it special are the peculiar dots connecting “inside” and “outside.”

A riveting, one of a kind cinematic experience, an ethnography of a community told with a profoundly compassionate eye that speaks to Frederick Wiseman’s Ex Libris: The New York Public Library and Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion.

Wang finds room for loving, faintly Guffman-esque character sketches (a local actor and critic have feuded for 50 years over a bad review); testimonials to the power of mentorship for preserving continuity; and a most daring gambit in part two in which performance spills over into everyday life as banal encounters take the form of tap routines and choral interludes.

The focus on the workings of an American institution may remind some of the expansive comedies of Robert Altman or the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman. But also, the blurring of the line between performance and reality, the embrace of an intimate theatricality, recalls the work of Jacques Rivette. These are cinematic giants, and this director may be on his way to joining them.

A tale of characters, dozens of them, all of whom have their passions and quirks and express themselves vigorously in sharp, insightful dialogue—reverberant aphorisms, dialectical clashes, and florid arias, which are composed by Wang.

Even its flaws convey something of its themes—the importance of having a place for art that isn’t perfect and isn’t going to appeal to everyone. Personal art, in other words.

The most surprising and challenging thing about Part Two is how it takes one of the central ideas from Part One—art's ability help us understand and express ourselves in everyday life—and externalizes it, so that creativity that might otherwise have been confined to the stages of the arts centers erupts into the world outside.