La Cocina 2024 Magnet
Our Love Written by Al Hazan Performed by The Starr Sisters
In the heart of the bustling kitchen of Times Square, dreams and desperation collide as each member of the staff chases the elusive American dream. 'La Cocina' (2024), a bold and unusual film by Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios, immediately reminded me of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Both films have a memorable scene that visually and symbolically represents everything that is wrong with the dehumanization of labor. Overall, both films present a sharp and fearless critique of the ugly aspects of the capitalist system, obviously in different eras and phases. 'La Cocina' combines this theme with the theme of illegal immigration in America today. Films about immigration in America have a tradition, one might say, they represent a separate genre.
What makes Ruizpalacios?
special is that the film is from the immigrants’ point of view. The director, most of the producers, the technical team, the actors and the heroes of the film are mostly non-Americans. The director is also the author of the screenplay adapted to American reality and now based on the play by the English playwright Arnold Arnold Wesker (which also became the screenplay for the film). The story takes place in a restaurant called ‘The Grill’. In the center of Manhattan, somewhere near Times Square. But we never enter through the front door.
Pedro is having an affair with Julia, a pregnant waitress
From the very first scene we are directed to the back entrance and in the film we only see the restaurant itself with local customers or tourists twice. The rest of the story takes place in the kitchen, where dozens of dishes are prepared for hundreds of customers at a hellish pace, or in the side streets or in the courtyards, where huge garbage bags are piled up, garbage trucks constantly spawn. Estela, an immigrant (probably illegal) who does not speak a word of English, is hired to work in the kitchen together with Pedro, also an illegal immigrant who has been working in the restaurant for several years. A woman wants to terminate a pregnancy, a man – who may love her or simply want to sort out his legal situation somehow – wants her to keep the baby. When $832 disappears from one of the cash registers, the entire staff, mostly immigrants, becomes suspicious. The temperature rises in the hell that is already the restaurant kitchen.
'La Cocina' is not an easy film to watch
It is quite long and has moments where the story drags on and the dialogues suffer from an excess of rhetoric and repetition that adds nothing. Fortunately, there are many other fantastic scenes that constantly happen on the screen, inspired by directorial decisions and something cinematically interesting. Perhaps fearing theatricality, director Alonso Ruizpalacios seems to constantly remind us that we are watching an artistic cinematic production. The cinematography uses black and white, with rare touches of color at key moments and in the finale, a process made famous, if not invented, by Steven Spielberg in Schindler’s List. The central scene of the film, which lasts about 15-20 minutes, is shot in a single long shot and manages to convey the hellish dynamics of the restaurant kitchen. The combination of neorealism in the approach and variety of cinematic means works very well.
We are not in a temple of gastronomy, but in a rather expensive fast food factory
Unlike many other films whose stories take place in the kitchen, in ‘La Cocina’ cooking is not (with one exception) an appetite, the screenwriter and director did not really care. The atmosphere of confusion conveyed to the audience is the way in which the heroes of the film feel like immigrants, faced with American reality, hellish working conditions, language barriers and mentality.