By Jake Wilson
LA COCINA ★★
(MA) 139 minutes
If there were a prize for Most Obtrusive Cinematography, Alonso Ruizpalacios’ La Cocina would be in the running. The main setting is the basement kitchen of The Grill, an imagined restaurant close to Times Square that operates on the scale of a small factory (filming was mostly in a studio in Mexico City).
Rooney Mara and Raúl Briones Carmona in a scene from La Cocina.
The camera tracks laterally along the overhead shelves, and the film’s whole midsection is occupied by a single chaotic but carefully choreographed long take in which all hell breaks loose during the lunchtime rush.
Elsewhere, dialogue scenes are filmed in heavy alternating close-ups, or the actors are pushed to the edges of the frame, with shots edited so their eyes don’t appear to meet.
Most of this is in black and white, with the old-school Academy screen ratio boosting the feeling of claustrophobia – though a couple of scenes make use of colour, and the screen expands from time to time, as if Ruizpalacios feared we might be getting bored.
Very loosely based on Arnold Wesker’s 1957 play The Kitchen, the film is an ensemble piece that follows a large number of employees, the majority of them undocumented immigrants from Latin America, over a single day spent toiling in The Grill’s depths.
La Cocina is set over the course of one day.
The central plotline involves Pedro (Raúl Briones Carmona), a Mexican cook near the end of his tether, and his waitress girlfriend Julia (a typically tense and whispery Rooney Mara).
She’s pregnant, he wants the baby and she doesn’t, and there’s an issue about getting money for an abortion – all of which might be just about enough to sustain an hour-long episode of conventional TV, with other subplots woven in.
Unfortunately, La Cocina is well over two hours long, and the hectic rhythm the film strives for, occasional lulls aside, isn’t matched by any great degree of narrative momentum.
Much as his style borrows from all over the place, Ruizpalacios is up to try out any dramatic approach that comes to mind, from social realism to whimsy to the kind of theatricality that entails long speeches heavy with symbolism (some taken from Wesker, or at least inspired by him). There’s even an incongruous UFO motif, reminiscent of Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City.
But the film I was most reminded of is Alfonso Cuaron’s 2018 Roma, which has a comparably pristine monochrome look and follows the same procedure of taking a small story with a message about inequality and treating it as if it were a big, splashy musical without the songs.
Since the behind-the-scenes documentary Road To Roma was shot by Juan Pablo Ramirez, who’s also the cinematographer here, there’s a fair chance the resemblance is more than coincidental.
Less likely to be conscious is the metaphor for the movie that emerges when the action spills over into The Grill’s above-ground dining area, with its mock-classical pillars, curved booths and twinkling lights.
All that fancy decor may help bring in the tourists. But what’s being served up is pizza, burgers, fish and chips – the kind of unremarkable food you could get anywhere.
La Cocina is in selected cinemas from today.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.