Director: Alonso Ruizpalacios
Stars: Rooney Mara, Raúl Briones, Anna Díaz
The fraught environs of the service industry have been mined expertly in recent years for their dramatic potential, particularly the intensity found in restaurant kitchens, with the likes of Boiling Point and TV smash The Bear providing viewers micro-doses of formidable stress. The adrenaline rush has been conveyed well enough to help us understand why a certain type of person might feel compelled to keep pace in such toxic climates. Part of us feeds off of the pressure. Some of us need it.
Alonso Ruizpalacios’ La Cocina arrives relatively late in the cycle for this subgenre, depicting a single day behind the scenes at a Times Square bistro called The Grill. Ruizpalacios shoots in monochrome, presumably to communicate some level of austerity. Scenes within the kitchen are boxed up in the academy ratio to enhance the sense of claustrophobia, while Juan Pablo Ramírez’s cinematography frequently pushes the characters down into the bottom half of the frame so as to visually symbolise their place in the pecking order and the weight of expectation on their shoulders. It’s all very self-conscious and self-important. A Serious Film. Too bad it’s aggravating, asinine, unbearably pretentious and terminally overlong.
Introduced during a truly nauseating stutter-mo opening credits sequence, our entry point into Ruizpalacios’ toxic arena is migrant Estela (Anna Díaz). One of the very few likeable characters in the rotation, she shows up in the morning at The Grill and chances her way into a job. Too bad she’s swallowed whole by the narrative within half an hour, her purpose served and expended.
Some $800 has gone missing from front-of-house, sending middle manager Mark (James Waterston) into a fluster. Waitress Julia (Rooney Mara) is preoccupied by an unwanted pregnancy, and all of this seems to orbit hotheaded chef Pedro (Raúl Briones) who is on notice from the head chef (Lee Sellars), with a three strike warning that sets up the end of the movie as a foregone conclusion. There’s also a leaky coke machine held at bay with a hairband, which leads to a preposterously fast flood just in time for the lunchtime rush.
The most galling thing about La Cocina in contrast to it’s contemporaries on the same subject is the trundling pace of the thing and the broadly ridiculous lack of professionalism which courses through every station and job role of The Grill. When one chef is cut, spilling copious blood over a newly plated fish and chips, the meal is still sent out for service. Chefs spend the majority of the day fighting with one another, smoking or spilling foamed up beer. And, rush hours aside, there seems an awful lot of downtime for Ruizpalacios’ numerous melodramas. There’s a hectic midsection when lunch time arrives, and it all builds to an overlong explosion of Pedro’s patience, but long stretches of La Cocina coast by indulgently, particularly 10 minutes spent on break waffling about dreams which tees up the rather unfulfilling finale.
At all times Ruizpalacios is keen to put himself fully within the frame, either through outré long shots, arch angles or playing fitfully with the rules of his own monochrome aesthetic. La Cocina is constantly needing to remind the viewer of its own prowess. Such affectations ultimately undermine the human dramas that unfold, and most characters receive short shrift as it becomes clearer and clearer that all is in service of Pedro’s climactic breakdown.
With it’s multi-lingual cast La Cocina gives some voice to the cultural melting pot that is New York’s underclass, and there’s the anticipated commentary on the serfdom of the contemporary service industry (teed up at the beginning with a Henry David Thoreau quote). But a through line of general crudity and gratuity exposes the film as something quite broad masquerading as high art. The self-aggrandising staginess of the whole piece pushes down any sense of reality. This isn’t helped any by the conveniences in the plot machinations. An abortion, apparently, is something you can do on your break as quickly as a trip to Starbucks.
Stretches of La Cocina are undeniably stylish. The actors are putting in the work and the production is polished. And there’s wry amusement to be had in the growing realisation that The Grill is probably a pretty shitty restaurant to visit. But it’s a perennially frustrating watch. With so much artifice and ego to contend with, there’s precious little space for authenticity. The material’s origins as a play ultimately announce themselves thanks to the heightened nature of the unfolding dramas that service Pedro’s egotistical downfall and, ultimately, precious little else. In terms of tone and bluster, its roughly analogous to Alejandro González Iñárritu joints like Birdman. If that’s your bag, enjoy!
The Lost Highway Hotel 