La cocina

Within the bustling confines of a Times Square eatery, a tumultuous ensemble of primarily immigrant cooks, waitstaff, and management struggle to navigate the frenzied lunch rush. This film is punctuated by intense, stress-inducing long-takes reminiscent of 'The Bear' and Barantini's 'Boiling Point', yet its narrative arc diverges significantly. Rather than focusing on the grind of preparing great food in a fancy restaurant, the story delves into the arduous journey of immigrants striving to survive. The ensemble cast delivers compelling performances, with Raúl Briones, stunning, and Rooney Mara powerful portrayals. The cinematography is breathtaking, capturing the essence of the narrative in an orchestrated chaos. A movie full of heart and heartbreak, it left a mark in the audience at the Berlinale film festival today.

If you saw "Boiling Point" (2021) then you'll get the gist of this drama set in an hectic New York restaurant kitchen. "The Grill" might look peaceful to the customers, but it's kitchen is a multi-cultural, multi-lingual and attitudinal melting pot of cooks, waitresses and cleaners under the guidance of a no-nonsense chef (Lee Sellars) and a slimy manager "Luis" (Eduardo Olmos). It's this latter man who finds there's a problem one morning when his boss reports that $800-odd is missing from one of the cash registers and the owner "Rashid" (Oded Fehr) is seeing red. Using the investigation as a pretext, we quickly discover that this room is full of characters who generally rub along ok with each other, except for "Pedro" (Raul Briones) and "Max" (Spenser Granese), with the latter man frequently and violently fed up with the lack of English being spoken in this kitchen of Babel. Meantime, "Pedro" is trying to rekindle his relationship with waitress "Julia" (Rooney Mara) who is expecting, but not intending to have, his baby. With everyone working flat out, the search for the missing cash and the prevailing, accumulating, sense of toxicity amidst this atmosphere, the scene is set for quite a lively look at the trade, it's traditions and the vulnerability of so many workers with a dubious legal status who are treated little better than slaves. Sadly, though, for me the film just didn't take off. Aside from the fact that there is simply far too much dialogue, it is much too long and the characterisations are way too shallow and under-developed. The acting isn't especially engaging, and the writing doesn't do enough to create anyone here that is liable enough to feel the remotest sympathy for. There are too many repetitious angry confrontations without enough humour to entertain or sustain much interest and as they quite literally wade through the story, it just runs out of steam before bordering on the farcical at the end. It's disappointing, sorry.

La Cocina (2024) is a black-and-white, thriller-adjacent drama set in the kitchen of a New York restaurant on a particularly stressful day in which the lunch rush is amplified by an investigation into a missing $800 dollars suspected to have been stolen from the tills the night before. Although it bounces around between the various members of staff, initially beginning with a fresh-faced immigrant fumbling her way around the city in an effort to locate a man she knew as a child and ask him for a job, it soon more-or-less lands on Pedro, a three-year kitchen veteran with clear anger management issues and a desire to work long enough to get his Green Card, and Julia, a no-nonsense waitress with anxiety issues and an urgent desire to get an abortion. The feature essentially depicts a difficult day in the life of its characters as they navigate their work and their personal lives while trying not to slip up and sacrifice their chance at the coveted American dream. Thematically, it's all about the immigrant experience and the way in which America views non-citizens as a means to an end, dangling the carrot of citizenship and acceptance as a way to encourage work within the capitalist nightmare that robs almost everyone of their individuality. While this is an interesting angle to explore and the affair occasionally does so with poignance, the overall experience struggles to marry its subtext with its setting and often feels as though it's trying to say so much that it ends up not really saying anything in particular. Having said that, it's still a well-written and keenly observed slice of fiction that feels naturalistic in its every aspect. It does sort of lose its way as it heads into its increasingly erratic and stereotypically explosive finale, but its earlier moments of comparative subtlety work really well and there are some sequences that are almost transcendent in their high-intensity urgency. A ten-minute apparent oner (which is actually at least two shots stitched together) is incredibly impressive, an immersive and suspenseful real-time presentation of an exceptionally stressful lunch rush that genuinely puts you on the edge of your seat. Elsewhere, the filmmaking is confident and considered, with often beautiful framing and an ability to make the mundane both strikingly cinematic and remarkably real all at the same time. The performances are grounded and nuanced, making each and every character feel as true-to-life as possible and enhancing the impact of even the story's most tangential moments so that everything feels as though it matters even if some of it technically doesn't. The cinematography is often striking, the writing is often poetic, and the production design is consistently delightfully unobtrusive. The piece has a fly-on-the-wall feel, a naturalistic aesthetic that enhances the impact of its purposefully messy and - I suppose - unfulfilling plotting. It looks really unique, a whole world unto itself, and its artistic elements are as necessary as its narrative ones. It's a really cohesive picture and it often works brilliantly. What holds me back from liking it more is the fact that it gets a bit too loose in the second half of its second act, before it becomes a bit too conventionally 'big' in its final third and then stops just shy of doing something truly out there that it might as well have done fully considering how heavily it alludes to it. It also doesn't compound its themes quite as well as it could have. Still, this is a really solid effort that doesn't quite feel like anything else I've seen so far this year. It's really good.

'La Cocina' (2024), the bold and unusual film by Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios, immediately reminded me of Charlie Chaplin's 'Modern Times'. Both films have one memorable scene that visually and symbolically represents all that is wrong with the dehumanization of work. As a whole, both films present scathing and fearless critiques of abhorrent aspects of the capitalist system, of course in different centuries and at different stages. 'La Cocina' combines this theme with that of illegal immigration in America today. Movies about immigration in America have a tradition, you could say they represent a separate genre. What is special about Ruizpalacios' film is that the point of view is that of immigrants. The director, most of the producers, the technical crew, the actors and the heroes of the film are mostly non-American. The director is also the author of the screenplay, adapted to the realities of America and today from a play (which also became a film script) by the English playwright Arnold Arnold Wesker.

The story takes place in a restaurant called 'The Grill' in the center of Manhattan, somewhere near Times Square. We never enter the front door, though. From the first scene, we are directed to the back entrance, and we will only see the restaurant itself, with its local or tourist customers, twice in the movie. The rest of the story takes place in the kitchen where dozens of dishes are prepared at a hellish pace for the hundreds of customers, or in the side streets or inner courtyards where the huge garbage bags permanently generated by the junk machine are stored. Estela, a (probably illegal) immigrant, who doesn't speak one word of English, is hired to work in the kitchen alongside Pedro, also an illegal immigrant, who has already been in the place for several years. Pedro has a relationship with the waitress Julia, who is pregnant. The woman wants to terminate the pregnancy, the man - who maybe loves her or maybe just wants to sort out his legal situation somehow - would like her to keep the baby. When $832 goes missing from one of the cashier machines, the entire staff, composed mostly of immigrants, comes under suspicion. The temperature is rising in the inferno that is already the restaurant kitchen.

'La Cocina' is not an easy film to watch. It is quite long and has moments when the story drags and the dialogues suffer from an excess of rhetoric and repetitions that add nothing. Fortunately, there are many other excellent scenes, inspired directorial decisions, and something cinematically interesting happening on screen all the time. Perhaps fearing theatricality, the director Alonso Ruizpalacios seems to constantly remind us that we watch a production of the art of film. The cinematography uses black and white, with rare spots of color at key moments and towards the end - a procedure if not invented, then made famous by Steven Spielberg in 'Schindler's List'). The scene at the core of the film, which lasts about 15-20 minutes, is filmed in one long shot and manages to convey the infernal dynamics of the activity in the restaurant's kitchen. The combination of the neo-realism of the attitude and the diversity of the cinematic means works very well. Unlike many other films whose stories take place in the kitchen, in 'La Cocina' the preparation of food is not (with one exception) appetizing, nor did the screenwriter and director really care. We are not in a temple of gastronomy but in a rather expensive junk food factory. The atmosphere of confusion that is transmitted to the viewers is what the heroes of the film feel as immigrants faced with the American realities, with hellish working conditions, with language barriers and mentalities. The diverse, multilingual and multicultural human landscape is excellently supported by a team of actors and extras, some amateurs, others professionals who enter the roles very well. Raúl Briones plays the role of Pedro exceptionally, although I could not fully decipher his character. Rooney Mara is cast in a very different role than the ones in other films I've seen her in, and once again demonstrates remarkable acting qualities. I am seeing, I think, for the first time Anna Díaz, who plays the role of Estela, and I hope to see her many more times in the future. Expressive and aggressive, 'La Cocina' is one of the good movies of the season, a film that takes us almost by force behind the scenes of the false shiny world that some of us enjoy and among the people who make it possible, with their dramas and sufferings.

This is the first film by this incredible director that I've watched, and in the last 20 minutes of the movie, I found myself unable to stop the tears from flowing. As I sat in the cinema seat, I felt every emotion he was conveying. It was truly a masterpiece.

Two days later, I find myself still thinking about the movie. I might even dare to say that it has touched something deep within me, something that had been quietly waiting for me to discover. I look forward to exploring more of Alonso's films soon, and I truly believe I will enjoy them as well.

I Can only say that I highly recommend this movie to anyone seeking a genuine glimpse into the real world.