The chef hasn’t stormed out of the kitchen so explosively since Big Night, Stanley Tucci’s failing-restaurant melodrama from 1996.
The Mexican auteur Alonso Ruizpalacios captures all the chaos and labour exploitation of a tourist-trap New York restaurant in this heated adaptation of The Kitchen, the 1957 play by the English dramatist and activist Arnold Wesker. When the Cherry Coke machine floods during peak lunchtime hours, one can practically smell the sickly goop and the panic.
Composed in elaborate, shouty takes – one 15-minute sequence hops between 20 characters – La Cocina is seldom less than operatic, with an emotional register to match.
Estella (Anna Diaz) is a youngster newly arrived from Mexico and hoping to find employment at the Grill through its Hispanic chef, Pedro (Raúl Briones). She is greeted by a chorus of voices and frantic action as she is swept through the restaurant.
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The heat spills out of the kitchen. In a back room, employees are questioned about a missing $800. Suspicions fall on the hot-headed Pedro, whose girlfriend, Julia (Rooney Mara), has asked him for precisely that amount to pay for an abortion. Tensions escalate. Doomed crustaceans symbolically splash around in a tank decorated with a miniature Statue of Liberty.
At a moment when modern labour demands more hours than those required of a medieval serf, surprisingly few movies are about work or the workplace. Ruizpalacios’s thrilling, sprawling drama takes on late-stage capitalism, exploitation and the precariousness of immigrant life in extravagant style.
Juan Pablo Ramírez’s impeccably choreographed monochrome cinematography captures a snapping, shrieking, stressful working environment punctuated by oddly magical interludes, including a story about lobster as haute cuisine and a supernatural tale about green light.
Briones is an outstanding protagonist in a kitchen where the staff’s anger and dysfunctionality are visibly shaped by the conditions. Mara, as ever, makes a lasting impression as a girlfriend who isn’t nearly as into the main character as he is into her.
La Cocina makes watching The Bear feel like listening to Enya in a garden centre.
In cinemas from Friday, March 28th
