EdgarST

Does anyone know the films of Bas Devo? I did not, but last night I saw «Here» (with the R backwards) and I loved it. It is beautiful. I do not know if perhaps this film and recent strikes have made me look at workers differently. It is what Reygadas, Martel, or Antonioni once tried to do, without reading workers' poetry that does not exist, the verses that go in their lunchboxes every day, that go in their little juices and their lunch of white rice with stewed whatever-it-is, and in the plastic bag of a Romanian worker in Brussels who makes soup... Do you know how many species of moss there are in the world? I do not know, but in the film they tell me there are thousands. The mosses are not worried about global warming or droughts, or that some rich idiots are humiliating the existence of indigenous people, through soldiers who cost a dime. There are the mosses, in unusual places, spreading life. And let what must happen, happen. Anyone want to see it while people goes to see «Superman»?

In spite of the stuffy narration, there is something fresh about this documentary that starts with children about to play, and then warns the audience against drinking water from contaminated rivers, a big problem Puerto Rico was confronting in the 1940s (as it is also ilustrated in Benjamin Doniger's short drama "El cacique"). While Doniger's film is more concerned with leadership in communities and does not follow the case of a sick child that opens the action, "A Drop of Water" show the kids collecting contaminated water, then goes first to a laboratory where a drop of water is fully scrutinized, and then to a hospital where a nurse alerts the viewers and three very sick-looking little boys are shown as proof of the dangers of dirty water. It then goes to the "didactic part", where we learn the solution of boiling water, and returns to the happy faces of kids at play. A good example of the early cinema produced in Puerto Rico.

After I watched "Güeros" (2014), I confess I put an X on Alonso Ruizpalacios and I did not see his subsequent films, much less his television work, which he began 20 years ago. But now that I have seen «La cocina» I think I will reconsider my veto and watch as many of his previous works as I can.

I do not know if the strong effect «La cocina» had on me was because it is based on the play «The Kitchen» by Arnold Wesker, an illustrious British playwright whose name is among the outstanding figures of the "Angry Young Men" movement in theater, which included John Osborne and Harold Pinter. As Wesker once said, they were not exactly angry, and certainly not within the context of the "swingin' London" of the 1960s, but rather a group of artists with a greater awareness of the economic, social, and political reality of the United Kingdom than most of their predecessors and who, from their perspectives, renewed literature, film, theater, music, and the visual arts.

However, I have no doubt that Ruizpalacios' contribution has been big and significant, because although the play «The Kitchen» arose from Wesker's experiences in a London kitchen (already filmed in 1961 by James Hill), the resulting film prioritizes the dilemma of Mexican Pedro in a restaurant in contemporary New York, where "representatives of the United Nations" work, most of them with dubious legal status, subject to the whims of an owner named Rashid, a chief of staff who is the son of Mexican migrants, and a chef who seems straight out of a German Expressionist horror story.

The film, moreover, acquires an unexpected resonance today, given the changes in the United States Presidency and the measures against immigrants. The characters -intelligently painted with brushstrokes, without delving into psychologisms- have their own dramas. What the irrepressible and angry Pedro (he is indeed angry, thanks to Raúl Briones' intense and passionate performance) experiences is a passionate melodrama with the American waitress Julia (Rooney Mara), whom he has impregnated. While she is considering an abortion that afternoon, one of the cash registers turns up missing $800, turning everyone into suspects amid their lives of limitation and deprivation (which we sense without the film going into any details). There is room for poetry, humor, science fiction, eroticism, and plot excesses (such as the kitchen flooding, where waiters, cooks, and the screaming chef continue to work nonstop), as the dramatic tension increases, increases, and explodes.

«La cocina» is a must-see film, even though it clocks in at 139 minutes, but it always has something interesting to tell, in a setting as prosaic as a kitchen, with a unique and strange touch that revisits and reframes magical realism. It is not without its difficult and imperfect moments, but I believe they are also characteristic of great artistic endeavors.