At the beginning of director Alonso Ruizpalacios’ La Cocina, I thought the film was in trouble. The opening credits sequence is of a young Mexican immigrant making her way from a boat to a bustling restaurant where she has been promised work. Ruizpalacios uses an effect that makes the images you see wash over the screen in a slow-motion, painterly way. It’s a creative and cinematic device, but it carried on for so long that I thought I’d be watching La Cocina with what amounted to blurred vision. I’m all for creative visual intros, but I shouldn’t be concerned that the film is suffering from a technical error.
And there endeth all my significant criticisms of La Cocina. Once Estela (Anna Diaz) reaches the mid-level eatery in Hell’s Kitchen—there is no small amount of irony between the geographical location and the workplace—Ruizpalacios’ film (adapted by the director from the 1957 play The Kitchen by Arnold Wesker) soon takes off like a ragged airplane at high throttle. Those who find the kitchen scenes in The Bear too stressful for them to watch will find no safe harbor here.
Shot in lustrous and dynamic black and white, La Cocina spends most of its time with the line cooks and a chef who speaks in the language of threat. There is a calamitous organization in the back of the house, but the constant pressure and chaos threaten to throw the whole operation off its axis at any moment. The pressure is extraordinary.
The restaurant’s owner (Oded Fehr who plays his restaurateur with a scowl, occasionally replaced by a more intimidating smile) is no benevolent dictator. Many members of his staff are undocumented and from all over the world. There’s a fair amount of locals too, making La Cocina a “melting pot” where all the characters are, well, melting.
All of them are on the lower economic rung, they work long exhausting hours without reasonable breaks and little room for exception—such as when one character returns from her lunch late due to her outpatient surgery taking too long. The fact that she is still bleeding is one that she knows will bring her no sympathy, so she gets back to taking orders.
It’s difficult to think that a film shot over a single work shift could manage to take this melange of characters and their backgrounds and juggle them so adroitly. These are the workers who make our food, bring our coffee, bus our tables, and serve us their whole lives with little hope of ever doing anything else. La Cocina forces you to consider their lives.
For the undocumented workers, the ground is always threatening to move beneath their feet. To have a bad day, crack wise at the wrong time to the chef, or just to make a mistake, could put you out on the street. The interesting point in the film is that the American workers live on the same sort of knife edge. A sudden firing of a person who lives paycheck to paycheck can have devastating results, even for a legal citizen.
Above all else, La Cocina is a film about class. The owner is the king. The chef is his first knight, the manager is his whipping boy, and the cooks and waitstaff are his servants more than they are the patrons.
Many staff members are forced to endure humiliating interrogations when a register comes up $800 short, all while making sure sandwiches get cooked. plated, and tabled in a timely fashion. Ruizpalacios and his gifted cinematographer Juan Pablo Ramírez shoot the film with a wild gracefulness that, I shit you not, at times reminded me of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. The intensity of the film is relentless, and even on the rare occasions when the film slows down long enough for the characters (and the viewer) to catch their breath, little hope can be found.
The film’s core story between Pedro (the electric Raul Briones) an undocumented line cook from Mexico and his not-so-secret lover, an American waitress named Julia (Rooney Mara, back on screen after a two-year layoff) makes the pointlessness of hope in their circumstances clear. Their moments of tenderness and hope seem tethered by the weakest of strings. Briones and Mara are effectively the leads in what is largely an ensemble film, and it’s hard to imagine La Cocina holding together so well without them.
Briones’ Pedro is a talented cook with hopes to one day be legalized and make a better life for himself, but the pressure of his daily life often makes his behavior erratic at work, and in constant danger of being terminated. When Mara’s Julia finally hits the screen (roughly 15 minutes into the film) she immediately puts away any movie star affectations and blends in perfectly with the cast of unknowns around her. Julia’s less-than-perfect dye job tells you she’s a woman who can’t always afford to keep it up. And then in the locker room, Julia pulls off two parlor tricks. First, she catches a cigarette thrown at her from across the room like a dart with her mouth. Then, she lights the cigarette by setting fire to her hand for the briefest of seconds. Mara, the biggest name on set, immediately fits in.
She and Briones make a very attractive couple, but Julia is a realist, and Pedro is a dreamer. Amongst all the chaos of the kitchen, these two finding each other might be an inspirational story in the hands of others. But that’s not what La Cocina is here to bring us.
La Cocina is about the pain of life on the lower ends. Any joy you get is fleeting, and soon overwhelmed by the conditions of your life that could turn desperate at any moment. It is a bold movie that forces us to see what we’d rather not view and what we don’t want to know about.
As the film reaches its fever-pitched crescendo, there is a moment when the melee that has ensued finally stops. When it does, two characters who’ve had mostly modest interactions but share similar backgrounds, stare at each other from across a kitchen that looks like a cyclone hit it.
Are they the same? Not exactly. But fate has brought them to this moment, and as they see the familiarity in each other, we see them too. Depending on our backgrounds, not necessarily in a familiar way, but in a genuine one. These are people. They serve us. Most of them we never see. The ones we do we easily forget.
Not this time. Not in La Cocina. We see, and we do not forget.
La Cocina will be playing at The Heartland International Film Festival in Indianapolis on October 13, 2024. Theatrical and streaming release dates TBD.
