A temperamental Mexican chef, one of many immigrants working in a New York restaurant, gets into trouble with his bosses.
It’s a pleasure to witness the growth of a film artist in real time, which I’ve been able to do in the case of Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios since watching his first film at a local festival back in 2014. Now with his fourth film, La Cocina, he’s reached a new level. It’s a major work, an impressive and absorbing drama.
La Cocina means The Kitchen in English, in this case the underground kitchen of a fictional Times Square New York eatery called The Grill. We’re brought into the story through a diminutive teen Mexican immigrant named Estela, played by Anna Díaz. She goes to the restaurant’s side entrance to ask if she can work as a cook. Her mother told her that a family friend named Pedro would make sure she got in. Without an appointment, she gets interviewed and hired by mistake because the woman who did have an appointment is late. Then she joins Pedro in the kitchen, whose specialty is preparing chicken dishes. This is all a clever narrative device for introducing us to this restaurant’s little world. Estela, it turns out, is not the main character—Pedro is. She becomes more of an audience surrogate responding to the chaotic stress and exhaustion of working in this high-end New York restaurant.
The movie is based on a popular British play from 1957 by Arnold Wesker called The Kitchen, and follows the basic plotline pretty closely, but Ruizpalacios modernizes it by populating the kitchen with immigrant New York workers. The chefs and assistants in the kitchen are mostly Latino—Mexican, Dominican, Puerto Rican, along with a few Arabs and Africans. They’re all hoping to work hard and long enough to become documented. One amusing sequence shows the Spanish speakers sharing different kinds of insults and swear words they prefer.
Pedro is played Raúl Briones, a superb theater-trained actor who I hope gains more visibility through this film. We first hear rumors of some kind of a fight the day before—Pedro and one of the few Anglo cooks going at it, with Pedro eventually pulling a knife. This has put him in hot water with the main chef, a loud brutal taskmaster. The restaurant owner is a sophisticated man, an Arab named Rashid. One of the main plot threads is that the paymaster has discovered that over $800 has gone missing from the till, and Rashid immediately suspects Pedro, one of his best chefs, but also a wild man and a troublemaker.
Pedro, we discover, is in love with one of the gringa waitresses, Julia, played by the excellent Rooney Mara. He’s gotten her pregnant, she wants an abortion, and it just so happens that this will cost $800. All the storylines are subsumed in an atmosphere of breakneck motion—one tumultuous day in the life of a big kitchen. A soda machine breaks and floods the place, causing even more chaos and bad tempers.
The key element in all of this is Ruizpalacios’ choice of shooting the film in high contrast black-and-white. The film’s stark, colorless palette creates the feeling of an almost hellish environment that has trapped all the characters. This is definitely a play, which means it has a dramatic climax that, when it finally happens, basicallly blows the whole story up, providing a showcase for Raúl Briones’ prodigious talent. La Cocina is an exhilarating pressure cooker of a movie.
