“La cocina” - Film Review
There are few places more chaotic, loud, and busy than Times Square. One location that takes the mania of those few blocks and cranks it up a few notches is the back-of-house area of a restaurant located in Times Square. Such is the setting for Alonso Ruizpalacios’ appropriately titled La cocina. The film is based on the 1957 stage play The Kitchen by Arnold Wesker, and La cocina marks the second film adaptation of this source material. The main difference in Ruizpalacios’ version of the material is that the immigrants who make up the majority of the kitchen staff are Latin American, whereas the cooks in the play were made up of primarily continental European immigrants.
It’s about to be the lunch rush at The Grill, a tourist trap of a restaurant in Times Square. The Grill promises to serve all the hits of American cuisine at exorbitant prices while underpaying those who work there. In the back of the house, there’s Estela (Anna Diaz). She has just arrived in the United States and was told by her mother to seek out a man named Pedro (Raúl Briones Carmona) who works in the kitchen of The Grill. He gets her a job and she’s thrown into the mayhem of what’s just another Friday for the employees of the restaurant. While the back-of-house staff is primarily made up of immigrants, most of the servers are white, American women. One of them, Julia (Rooney Mara), is pregnant with Pedro’s kid. He wants to keep it, but she doesn’t. Their heated debate is one of many that unfold over the course of the lunch rush.
Cinépolis, WILLA
La cocina will inevitably draw comparisons to The Bear, since it’s the cooking/restaurant show currently in the zeitgeist. However, La cocina bears more of a resemblance to a lesser-seen movie called Boiling Point, a taut 92-minute, one-shot film about dinner rush in an upscale London restaurant. La cocina, while not a one-shot for the entire film, is always moving. There is a restless, urgent energy coursing through it that culminates in a truly spectacular sequence once the restaurant actually begins service. It is a well-organized, perfectly choreographed sense of madness that unfolds in restaurant kitchens worldwide every single day. In an already amped-up film, this standout sequence manages to elevate the tension and activity to a dizzying degree.
Most of La cocina takes place in and around The Grill. The audience is introduced to the labyrinth of hallways that twist upon themselves in the way that all New York buildings seem to do. Too many people in too small a space with too much to be done. It’s the basis of all NYC architecture. When constrained to this single setting, La cocina is at its best and most claustrophobic. As the lunch rush dies down, the people begin to disperse, to ooze out of the building that confines them for so many hours a day. It’s this departure that pumps the brakes of La cocina. As soon as the air is let out of the room, we lose a bit of the urgency. There’s something powerful in a film that will not let its audience breathe for the duration of its runtime. A powder keg always on the verge of an explosion that’s suddenly extinguished releases all the anxiety it's already created. Such is the case of La cocina when it leaves the kitchen.
“Whatever happens, it’s only work,” Julia tells Estela before service begins. It’s a placating sentiment, one Estela cannot understand and one that doesn’t hold much water. It’s only work, but it’s life and death as well. So many of the people working in the kitchen see this work as their chance at their version of the American Dream. La cocina beautifully showcases the overlap of immigration and the tourist industry, how they feed off one another not to survive, but merely exist to see another lunch rush. La cocina is careening off the edge of the world at breakneck speed, not for greatness or millions of dollars, but for the simple ability to live a better life.
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