La Cocina

La Cocina: Long before establishing himself as an extraordinary new filmmaker in Mexico, with a distinctive and original voice, Alonso Ruizpalacios was busy washing up in a crowded kitchen in a big city. Such a background prompts everyone’s beloved director of Museos fourth feature, La cocina, which he directed and co-wrote, easily inspired and worked on detached adaptation of Arnold Wesker’s 1957 play The Kitchen set in modern day New York.

With this film, Ruizpalacios or the entire crew for that matter was able to bring to life a chaotic dark comedy set in a high end Manhattan restaurant where no person and no problem is ever simple. Lauro’s depressive character seems to say it all even for those who are seeing the film without the context of the immigration crisis – it seems unfathomable so many people are willing to leave their comfort, litter over the trying seas in an unforgiving tide only to end up back in the unilateral respects where one needs to earn their keep however soft the touch towards them might be.

Cristina, the manager and only male who isn’t afraid to throw his knife and shout at the orderlies telling them to get their heads in the game and bring back proper life and integrity to the business, at least came across demeaned to the point of being unpleasant. Food, one may state, did not even seem tasteful to begin with, let alone curious after watching it being made and Louis, the illegal line cook seemed more or less perfectly situated between the rack of frying pans and the flames over the grill.

It is likely that Ruizpalacios’ transformations could have been endorsed by Wesker too. As left-leaning playwright Ruizpalacios says: “To Shakespeare, the world may have been a stage but to me, it is a kitchen, where individuals rush in and out and do not hang around long enough to know one another, and friendships, loves and enmities are also created and forgotten at the blink of an eye” “The kitchen is made up of many people and relationships that always evolve and develop”.

Wesker is noted to sympathize with the soldiers of food service and the Mexican writer-director does just that, using an all-inclusive approach to their job. The complication of “La Cocina” is that it immerses us into the battles when the crucial questions of why will this one single day in the operation be chaotic again — such as a waitress considering whether she should intestate her pregnancy, rather than the question of a pesky $800 which was lost from the cash register (exactly the price of this operation).

Ruizpalacios, in fact, begins the film somewhere quite different from 49th Street, where rats and rodents devour yesterday’s outcasts of food. But, the mild and dizzying sequences of Estela (Anna Diaz), the protagonist, who after gaining experience working in a Michelin restaurant has come to inter turn the centre she dreams of for some run of the mill restaurant. There is a childlike touching to the prologue.

This is a smooth way to step in, not so different from the case of Peggy in the first episode of ‘Mad Men’, who was the least experienced staff in a completely unfamiliar place. The audience gradually adapts to the workplace along with the new girl in the show. In this instance, the new girl is Estela who later becomes less relevant as the story moves on. She understands that it would be appropriate to drop the name of one of their family friends, Pedro Raúl Briones, who works as a poultry chef at The Grill. That gets her the job although it is assumed that Pedro is already on the edge of being fired: he’s had three chances and breached them all.

He’s late for his job and is very fast to be pointed out as the chief suspect in a robbery that takes place at the cash register disguised as a tool of social critique, the author’s view – the atrocious abuse of corporate America’s intolerance and discrimination. Ibid, Ruizpalacios knows how to manipulate the viewers’ conclusions (we’re all curious about who the culprit is, after all), and makes sure to reveal several pieces of the puzzle only later on – for instance, that Pedro is married to Matari’s daughter, Julia. Turns out, she is expecting a baby from him.

The movie moves slow but at 139 minutes, it gets to the climax at lunchtime’s rush hour. In the lull before the chaos, lovers get stressed over things that are not related to the job. When Pedro heard that Julia, M’s daughter was back in town, he took Estela’s special Mexican Recipe and called it a sandwich made out of love. She thanks him back with a fast wild loving in the stalk room.

Still, while Briones may have the showier part of one, Julia claims a disproportionate amount of power over Pedro: it’s her right to choose if she wants to have a child and within that decision lies their relationship and his visa too. If this kitchen is to serve as a vision of the world, then this kitchen tells us the enormity of how much this society depends on migrant workers.

Rachael and white ladies attend to the clients while standing in front of the swinging doors but the US citizens mostly do not hold down the back of house. Ruizpalacios combines all the different languages in one breathtaking collage where we see the micro-dynamics with which this operation is sustained. A brutish man at the hot station screams, “Speak English!” with knife-hands as if debating self-castration.

When the patrons (who are very seldom to be seen) hurries for service, the line cooks suit up for action. Things get even more frantic because the orders keep coming in – Pedro sees the receipt printer as a great nuisance, until he can’t stand it anymore and one of the waitresses says something particularly nasty that is the last straw for him. They told us to expect that, but who would expect such an explosive scenario? A scene with social news anchor Howard Beale shouting and losing it in one of the New York franchises for tourists — how great is that! It’s the ultimate cathartic release for anyone who ever had to work in a kitchen in the first place in La Cocina.

That’s how Ruizpalacios conducts his ensemble — almost twenty people from hard manager Rashid (Oded Fehr) to the bummest busboy, symmetrical to a late-stage Altman style. DP Juan Pablo Ramírez’s black and white cinematography is nonetheless harsh to fit this stereotype, it’s similar to the director’s first picture “Güeros” which was filmed in a more independent style. Building up this many characters also requires a lot of timing especially with the urgency of the kitchen during lunchtime peak hours.

There comes a moment where a damaged carbonated beverage vending machine gushes liquid across the area which causes both the dispatchers and the waiters to nearly be drenched when reaching their posts. As La Cocina welcomes the chaos of a kitchen which is starting to resemble a galley on a Roman galley from Ben Hur, it is not difficult to understand why. This is the furnace, if one is to consider America as a ‘melting pot’, this is the furnace.

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