LA COCINA (Alonso Ruizpalacios 2024)

[Chris Knipp]

ROONEY MARA AND RAÚL BRIONES IN LA COCINA

ALONSO RUIZPALACIOS: LA COCINA (2024)

Ruizpalacios updates and expands "The Kitchen"

Before we talk about Ruizpalacios' fourth feature, La Cocina, there's a third one we need to catch up on. It's Una película de policias/A Cop Movie (2021), which won the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution at the Berlinale, and is showing on Netflix. Cop[ Movie is an inventive hybrid of documentary and fiction. Two actors play Teresa and Montoya, a real couple who are also road partners in the Mexico City police. But we don't know they're actors. It seems like a documentary, until they turn to the camera midway and start telling the director what preparing for their roles has felt like. Later, the real cop couple appears to address the camera. In the end you feel disoriented - and also disillusioned, not by Ruizpalacios' "engaño," but at the picture he has provided through these methods of what it's like being a Mexican cop. In A Cop Movie Alonso (as the actors call him) has been "dazzling and playful" (the words of Jonathan Romney, in BFI)), in breaking down the third wall again as he did in his first two films (real favorites of mine), Güeros and Museo .

It might have been fine with me if Ruizpalacios had simply gone on making variations Güeros and Museo. I admit I somewhat miss the intimacy and wit of those earlier films in what he has been doing since. But that is not what he needed to do. He has taken on a larger subject - the public welfare, and a more collective one, in bringing the world of the police to life.

Movie number four moves outward too. La Cocina takes on a big directorial challenge of complicated people-wrangling with close to two dozen characters in a big restaurant kitchen, nearly all of them undocumented and Hispanic. Ruizpalacios he has come north, taking the long road of immigration to New York City and a big tourist restaurant called The Grill near Times Square with a very large staff who through the day rapidly grind out hundreds of very ordinary dishes, a place of whose toiling masses the customers out front see only the aproned waitresses.

This is a filmmaker whose abundant talents require him to branch out. Having run through Nouvelle Vague influences, evoking the off-kilter moods of Latin American youth films like Alexis dos Santos' 2006 Glue, Che Sandoval's You Think You're the Prettiest, But You Are the Sluttiestt (2009), and the work of Fernando Eimbcke and Gerardo Naranjo, he took hints from Errol Morris for A Cop Movie (adding a very Mexican flavor). La cocina, it's no secret, is a riff off of Arnold Wesker's 1959 play, The Kitchen.

The Kitchen has been performed all over the world continuously since is Fifteis origin. It's a template for the turmoil that goes on behind the scenes at a restaurant and it's about work, and there's a line from Thoreau that starts it, "This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle!" It just hints that this is about, to quote David Erlich, who's more earnest than myself, "the lie of the American Dream through the exploitation of undocumented immigrants and the hustle culture of late-stage capitalism." An English critic has called The Kitchen "Wesker's metaphor for the dehumanizing impact of industrialized labour."

There's also more human interest and intimacy in the play than those words imply and there's personal experience behind this new movie. Ruizpalacios actually washed dishes in a restaurant in London for a while, and that's where he learned about Wesker's play (and the 1961 film James Hill directed). He personally experienced the humiliation, chaos, hostility and love the play finds in a commercial kitchen. Wesker's play must have made a strong impression on him. He follows its outline, scenes, even individual lines closely. It's surprising to see how similar the endings are of the main characters in both cases causing chaos and being congratulated by the owner of the restaurant: "You stopped me."

But Ruizpalacios has added a lot of buzz and Spanish to Wesker; he has considerably decorated and embroidered and spiced it up and made it contemporary. If the 1961 film, though it holds up very well, looks stagey now, La Cocina, with Juan Pablo Ramírez' soft, sometimes dreamy black and white cinematography with a few sprinkles of color, bubbles with energy, even menace. In Wesker's play, there was a fight between cooks the night before and one of them has a black eye. In Lo Cocina, there is still lively hostility, and all the upper level people now have become transparently mean and nasty.

Wesker's kitchen staff is British, Eastern European, and German, though. Ruizpalacios has expanded the dialogue about dreams during the break period, with a lengthy and impressive new monologue spoken by Motell Foster, and taken it into a side street outside. This sequence, a time of quiet that relieves the frantic intensity for a while, is one of the memorable sequences in the film. A lot of swearing has appeared tht the Fifties didn't allow. Ruizpalacios has considerably expanded and intensified the physical business, especially between Pedro, the amorous cook, and Julia, and he has expanded their plot line about a pregnancy. Raul Briones, who plays Pedro, also costarred as the cop Montoya in Ruizpalacios' last movie, A Cop Movie. Rooney Mara is the married waitress Julia, whom he's in love with and has gotten pregnant. She wants to get an abortion, and over $800 has disappeared from yesterday's take, about the cost of the procedure, arousing suspicion.

True, the Cocina doesn't seem to be really cranking out dozens of dishes any more than The Kitchen (it was impossible to simulate food-preparation on a stage, and the original theatrical production, I believe, the food was entirely imaginary). For that you have go to a documentary, and there have been some good ones by Rebecca Halpern, Frederick Wiseman, Lydia Tenaglia, Paul Lacoste, Morgan Neville, and many others. What Ruizpalacios is interested in, like Wesker, is the human relations and the exploitation of labor in this environment. And this is a totally new version of a familiar theme. Ruizpalacios noted at the Berlin press conference that they were aware of "toxic masculinity" but also aware that this concept wields no liberating power within the strict hierarchies even of today's of restaurant kitchens.But the differences are considerable nonetheless. Watch La Cocina, and watch The Kitchen (free on YouTube) as well. They're illuminating microcosms that become more enlightening when compared. It will be exciting to see what Ruizpalacios will do next. (We won't fall behind again.)

La Cocina, 139 mins., debuted at Berlin (like all Ruizpalacios' films), showing also at Beijing, Shanghai, Sydney, Tribeca, Jerusalem, Wrocław, Melbourne, and several dozen other festivals. It opens in the UK Dec. 26 2024. It opens in the US Oct. 25. At the Roxie, San Francisco, Nov. 1.