Pop culture is hardly lacking for examples of how stressful operating a professional kitchen can be – Jeremy Allen White serves as the face that launched a thousand ‘Yes Chefs’ in The Bear, while Philip Barantini’s Boiling Point was adapted into a BBC television series this year. But there’s still room for more stories in this subgenre, as Alonso Ruizpalacios proves with La Cocina (The Kitchen), set in a Times Square chain restaurant during the Friday lunchtime rush. Based on Arnold Wesker’s 1959 play of the same name, its intricate character relationships and intensely stressful yet balletic kitchen scenes make for compelling viewing, so much so that the 140-minute runtime flies by.
While Wesker’s original text focused on a highly-strung German chef and a cast of predominantly British and Irish kitchen staff, Ruizpalacios adapts the text to mirror a more contemporary New York location. The dialogue is spoken in English and Spanish reflecting the literal and metaphorical melting pot of the city, and amid one gruelling lunch service the lively chefs and servers discuss everything from a suspected cash theft to the appeal of white women as a Mexican man. At the centre of the chaos is Pedro (Raúl Briones), a charismatic but volatile chef, who is loved and loathed by his colleagues in seemingly equal measure. In an ego war with humourless fellow chef Max (Spenser Granese) and attempting to prove his romantic feelings for waitress Julia (Rooney Mara) are sincere, Pedro is one bad shift away from losing everything – not dissimilar from Stephen Graham’s hapless Andy in Boiling Point as it happens.
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As combustible as he is, Pedro is also hopelessly charismatic, and it’s easy to see why he’s able to pull rabbits out of hats. An undocumented immigrant in New York, he’s caught between his native Mexico where his family are and the city he’s tried to build a life in, fighting the pull of both. Meanwhile, the deadpan and pragmatic Julia has already made up her mind to abort their baby – a decision Pedro begs her to reconsider in between the grind of kitchen duty, elevated to master craftwork through the detailed sound design which emphasises every chop, grate, sear and sizzle.
It’s a smart move on Ruizpalacios’s part to refresh the geography and politics of The Kitchen, as the exploitation of immigrant labour in the food industry is well-documented and sadly all too common. Yet as well as presenting the extent of these gross employment practices, Ruizpalacios also emphasises the found families that exist in these spaces, as immigrants come together to break bread and share cigarettes, swapping stories and bickering like siblings rather than colleagues. It’s not all choreographed chaos, either – La Cocina soars in its quiet moments, notably as Pedro and Julia meet by the restaurant’s lobster tank, and share a less sanitary tryst in the kitchen’s walk-in freezer.
There’s evidence of the film’s stage origins, notably in a monologue delivered by Brooklyn-born dessert chef Nonzo (Motell Gyn Foster) and the balletic choreography of the lunch service itself, but the transformation to screen works well, even with a recurring slow-motion blur motif that doesn’t add much. More successful is Ruizpalacios’s sparing use of coloured light that contrasts with the austere black-and-white cinematography, lending a sparing trace of magic that reflects the alchemy of running a professional kitchen day in, day out.
Raúl Briones gives a mesmerising performance as the public menace that is Pedro, while Ruizpalacios has created a compelling drama that deftly spins many plates, reflecting on the cultural clash between North and Latin America, the misogyny and racism rife in the hypermasculine world of professional cooking, and the personal sacrifice of physical and mental wellbeing that occurs in the gig economy. It’s a film that achieves a striking pace, and is likely to prove one of the highlights of the 2024 Berlinale competition.
