La Coci­na review – pow­ered by Raúl Briones’ man­ic performance

Pop cul­ture is hard­ly lack­ing for exam­ples of how stress­ful oper­at­ing a pro­fes­sion­al kitchen can be – from Camp­bell Scott and Stan­ley Tucci’s clas­sic Big Night to tele­vi­sion smash hit The Bear. 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 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.

As com­bustible as he is, Pedro is also hope­less­ly charis­mat­ic – 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 thought­ful sound design which empha­sis­es every chop, grate, sear and sizzle.

It’s a smart move 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. 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 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’ 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.