La Cocina: Whirlwind Resto Drama with Exploited Illegals in a Times Square Hell's Kitchen
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A-
Shot in black-and-white and set in the underground kitchen of a New York tourist restaurant called The Grill off Time Square, La Cocina (The Kitchen), from Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios, is a sustained whirlwind of a film, featuring a panoply of characters, fights, a theft, romance, racial and political tensions and virtuosic tracking camera work.
The prologue begins with a quote from 19th Century philosopher, Henry David Thoreau lamenting the incessant business of modern life. A narrow frame shows swelling ocean waves as we find ourselves on the deck of the Staten Island ferry, with a teen-aged Mexican immigrant, Estella (Anna Díaz). A series of fragmented scenes follow her on a subway trip, asking people directions in Spanish, en route to Times Square.
On the soundtrack, a man’s voiceover begins intoning phrases that fall between Beat poetry and the characteristic speech patterns of some forms of mental illness, chaining words that connect semantically, but without a coherent context:
“You ever seen a body? This is the heart. Right here, Time Square. You go look at it. What is Time Square? Time has no squares in it but time does have the circles and now if you circulate yourself, so each time you walk around here and you can see somebody that’s not a square. I know I’m not.”
The speaker continues in this vein, a rambling meditation about time, chance and place, until he suddenly appears on camera, an apparently homeless man sitting on the ground in Times Square, talking to the world.
Estella walks by, nods to him with a quick, “Gracias” for his peculiar advice before moving on to her destination, snaking through the rats’ warren of underground corridors leading to the kitchen.
A viewer’s first reaction might be to brace themselves for a long (139 minute), patience-straining experimental film. But despite its fragmented beginning, La Cocina harks back to something quite traditional, old-fashioned even, which is working-class experimental theatre.
The source material is the 1957 play, The Kitchen, by Arnold Wesker, a writer associated with the socialist leaning literary movements known as the “angry young men” (John Osborne, Alan Silitoe), which had a strong kinship to the British New Wave cinema of the early ‘60s. In fact, Wesker’s play was previously filmed in 1961 by James Hill, (later the director of Born Free).
Estella has a contact with a chef named Pedro, who hails from her hometown in Mexico. The sleazy kitchen manager, Luis (Eduardo Olmos) gives her a line job. And gradually we learn about the other characters who live here in the belly of the restaurant beast, a caste system divided by gender, race and status.
The central narrative event is about theft: More than $800 dollars is missing from the till, and accountant Mark (James Waterston) assigns manager Luis to interrogate the staff, because bringing in police would expose the number of undocumented workers on staff and God knows what else.
As the investigation proceeds, there are nasty tensions between Mexican chicken chef Pedro (Raúl Briones) and white American steak cook, Max (Spenser Granese), who is repeatedly incensed with the kitchen staff speaking Spanish among themselves.
We gradually learn about a relationship between the charismatic Pedro and an American-born front-of-house waitress, Julia (Rooney Mara). She’s pregnant and wants an abortion, the cost of which happens to be about the same amount as the stolen money.
Meanwhile, the Arab-American owner, Rashid (Oded Fehr) wanders in an out of the kitchen, cryptically dangling the possibility of providing Pedro the papers that would make him legal. Throughout, the head chef (Lee R. Sellar), whose default temperature is raging boil, threatens termination and violence against his unruly mob.
To compound the chaos, the cherry coke dispenser malfunctions, flooding the entire kitchen in dark syrupy liquid. And all this before lunch shift has finished.
There’s no single protagonist in La Cocina, but most of the drama revolves around Pedro, a trouble-causer, a hothead, and romantic, who is often at the centre of the dramatic action. He has a leadership role among the other Latino workers and hypersensitivity to slurs, leading to his climactic meltdown.
He’s also an obstinate romantic, who wants Julia to have the baby and go to Mexico with him, so something “beautiful” can come of their time in the kitchen hellhole. Julia, for her part, is too intelligent and experienced to fall for that fantasy. Other staff speculate openly that Pedro’s only interest in Julia is a chance to get a visa.
Though never stagey, La Cocina does feel theatrical, with set-piece scenes and monologues that break out from the central stage of the kitchen, as the film’s momentum moves through peaks and plateaus. The breakout scenes include a tryst in the walk-in refrigerator, women bantering as they change in the locker room, and the arrival of a homeless man (Canadian actor John Pyper-Ferguson) looking for a handout, who pointedly claims that he was once a banker.
The most extended breakaway sequence takes place at the end of the first shift when a handful of the kitchen staff take a break in the alley. At that point, secondary characters get their own monologues and talk about their dreams of money, homes and love. They include a Moroccan lesbian named Samara (Soundos Mosbah), and a Brooklyn pastry chef, Nonzo (Motell Foster) who tells a long, confusing tale of an Italian immigrant at Ellis Island who get immersed in a green light, (i.e. the colour of American money) before vanishing.
Though impressively choreographed, tracking a couple of dozen characters in tight confines, La Cocina could not be accused of over-subtlety. Ruizpalacio’s purpose is to present the harried workplace as a microcosm of American capitalism, its obsession with abused undocumented immigrants, anger at women’s reproduction rights and devotion to the churning machinery of consumption.
The message isn’t new but, in the present moment, the sheer bluntness of the critique feels liberating.
La Cocina. Directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios. Written by Alonso Ruizpalacios, based on the play, The Kitchen, by Arnold Wesker. Starring; Raúl Briones Carmona, Rooney Mara, Anna Diaz, Motell Foster,Oged Fehr,and Spenser Granese. In theatres December 6.