‘La Cocina’: Berlin Review

Dir: Alonso Ruizpalacios. Mexico/USA. 2024. 139mins

The debut play by social realist Arnold Wesker – one of the Angry Young Men who shook up the British theatre scene of the 1950s and early 1960s – ’The Kitchen’ is perhaps more celebrated outside of the English-speaking world today. A study in working class solidarity, disunity and alienation, it turns one long day in the kitchen of a busy urban restaurant into a sounding board for the fractures and frustrations of working life in the lower recesses of the capitalist pyramid.

 Too often feels simply strident

In adapting the play for the screen for the second time since James Hill’s little remembered UK production from 1961, Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios relocates Wesker’s London-set drama, with its German, Maltese and Cypriot kitchen staff, to a New York restaurant called The Grill where a large Latinx contingent works both back and front of house. He also takes some liberties with the story – chiefly in a sub-plot regarding a chunk of money that is missing from the previous evening’s takings. But despite these changes, we never shake off the feeling we’re watching a filmed play, one whose dramatic crescendos and lulls are relentlessly stagey and stylised.

In Ruizpalacios’ last feature, the hybrid, shape-shifting docudrama A Cop Movie, artifice was part of the point of a film that presented police work, in a society where it has lost its connection with ethics and social justice, as a kind of performance. There is no such obvious explanation for the staginess of La Cocina, which stars A Cop Movie’s wiry anti-hero Raul Briones as a bracingly unlikeable, quick-tempered Mexican chef who is engaged in a conflictual – or more accurately, abusive – love affair with Rooney Mara’s native New Yorker waitress.

Set both literally and metaphorically in Hells Kitchen, New York, over the course of a single day, this is a film that keeps shuttling between realistic and symbolic modes, peppering a story set in a kitchen of underpaid, exploited workers – whose bosses keep them on the hook by dangling the promise of settled status – with solemn, poetic or bitterly sardonic reflections on the immigrant experience.

The urgency of feeding the customers who are clamouring for their food on the other side of the swing doors is conveniently put on hold whenever a dramatic set piece looms – as when Lee R. Sellars’ gruff Bronx head chef is suddenly persuaded, for no credible reason, to give a tuneless rendition of the Mexican national anthem. For all its authentic food-station kitchen layout, La Cocina lacks the fascinating eye for behind-the-scenes detail that was part of the appeal of two recent restaurant dramas, US series The Bear and British feature and series Boiling Point. Audiences who responded to those contemporary kitchen stories are unlikely to be engaged. But those vanishing few who have always wondered what John Cassavetes would have made of a Bake Off feature film could just be tempted to give this 2024 Berlinale Competition entry a look.

That Cassavetes echo reverberates not just because of La Cocina’s New York setting, its black and white cinematography, its boxy Academy ratio, the whiff of the Actors Studio in the performances – but also because of the film’s refusal to commit to the here and now. Instead, with its mid-century-modern restaurant interior and conspicuous lack of mobile phones, it occupies a temporal netherworld that feels not so much universal, more plain unfocused. And yet, from its first black and white stutter-motion scenes that show young kitchen worker Estela – a sensitive performance from relative newcomer Anna Diaz – on an East River ferry, La Cocina often possesses a teasing formal beauty. (It’s a quality enhanced by Tomas Barreiro’s soundtrack, which employs a Welsh male voice choir to striking effect).

In one of several bravura set pieces, Mara’s wary, brittle, vulnerable waitress Julia is seen cleaning the glass of the restaurant lobster tank as Briones’ predatory Pedro, the chef responsible for her unwanted pregnancy, circles around. At first we’re held, as Pedro plays along with Julia’s game of pretending not to know who he is. But then a bucketful of lobsters, pincers bound, are tipped into the tank on top of an underwater Statue of Liberty replica. This constant striving for symbolic import sums up the issues of a maximalist drama that is full of drive, ideas and ambition, but charts no satisfying dramatic arc, and too often feels simply strident.