Film
La cocina, an adaptation of Arnold Wesker’s 1957 play The Kitchen, is an exploration of migrant worker misery sharpened by the political environment in America today. By Luke Goodsell.
Tensions simmer in Alonso Ruizpalacios’s La cocina
A magnet for middle-class tourists, enterprising rodents and undocumented workers all hungry for a bite of the American dream, the Manhattan restaurant at the centre of La cocina – Mexican filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios’s new adaptation of Arnold Wesker’s play The Kitchen – is one of those generic mid-town joints serving franchise food and sociopolitical metaphor in equal measure. On the menu: burgers, pizza, pasta, cheesecake, capitalism, immigration and a side order of women’s reproductive rights.
Located just north of Times Square, The Grill might as well be on Ellis Island, erstwhile gateway for the nation’s tired and poor. It’s a proverbial melting pot of immigrant workers, many of them Hispanic, and some courting gringo partners they cheekily dub “the love of my visa”. In the unlikely event that you miss the analogy, the restaurant’s entrance features a lobster tank with a submerged Statue of Liberty, ready to welcome the huddled crustacean masses before they’re cruelly boiled alive.
La cocina brings Wesker’s ingredients to an almost immediate simmer, its Steadicam camera frantically prowling the labyrinthine corridors and crevices of the restaurant as the diurnal chaos unfolds. The hiring office, lit with an eerie glow that renders its portly manager a denizen of the underworld, serves to usher new workers into the maze.
The bustling kitchen, deep within the belly of the beast, is abuzz with line cooks bantering, bumming cigs and knocking back beers as they prep the dishes du jour. One of the cooks, a surly white guy with anger management issues, wears a gladiator vest under his apron; another spends his smoke break peeping into the female locker room. Nobody seems especially thrilled to be here.
Adding to the pressure cooker, someone has apparently pilfered the till to the tune of $800, prompting an inquisition that predictably fingers the lower-rung employees. Meanwhile, Julia, a front-of-house waitress played by the movie’s lone American star, a bleached-blonde Rooney Mara, is pregnant after a tempestuous affair with Pedro (Raúl Briones Carmona), a volatile Mexican cook who’s pushing her to keep the kid.
The tension might be seasoned with hostility but Ruizpalacios, who has contemporised Wesker’s mid-century dialogue, also has a keen ear for the easy rapport shared by the eclectic back-of-house staff, who trade the kind of playful insults and racist jokes that would make their patrons blush. We’re barely afforded a glimpse of their final product: the only time the camera lingers on a dish it’s to savour the food the cooks prepare for each other, usually unassuming sandwiches made to nourish. It makes for a refreshing corrective to the food porn so coveted by bougie audiences.
Cinematographer Juan Pablo Ramírez’s richly textured black-and-white photography pulls focus from the dishes and onto the staff, catching the anxiety, anguish and yearning etched across their features. If the crisp images and slick, impressively fluid choreography of the shots sometimes risk fetishising the working-class characters, then the images also feel like an homage to the British social realist cinema of the early 1960s that evolved alongside Wesker’s early work – and indeed yielded the lone big-screen adaptation of The Kitchen, in 1961.
Wesker’s original 1957 play, set in a West End London eatery and brimming with Anglo angst over “foreigners” – Germans, Irish, Spanish, Cypriots – is a far more modest work and not just in its “bloody boring menu” of lamb chops, veal cutlets, sausages and minestrone. In contrast, La cocina smothers Wesker’s recipe in a layer of spicy sauce: the dialogue is more pointed, the pace more frenzied, and the analogies arrive so thick and fast that an audience is liable to feel force-fed.
Take the original’s interlude, in which the characters speak to their dreams. In La cocina it becomes a distended passage that nearly stops the movie dead in its tracks to deliver the message. Then there’s the late-act tramp who wanders into the kitchen looking for a meal, and who the movie treats as a walking CNN chyron, on hand to dispense a thematic checklist of everything from the financial collapse and the climate crisis to the ills of big pharma and the war in the Middle East.
Still, these moments retain Wesker’s essential spirit and they’re plenty zesty. Pedro’s eventual tragicomic collapse is a whirling burlesque that strains credibility but may also be the best food-related big-screen meltdown since Ann-Margret took a baked bean bath in Tommy.
If things sometimes feel overcooked, they’re commensurate with both the nerve-jangling energy of New York and the madness of a moment in which the United States president wants to all but annex Central America and erase its cultural identity.Ruizpalacios is clear-eyed in his anger and he captures the city with an outsider’s empathy for those clawing at its fringes, desperate to make it in a country even as it sells them a lie.
The writer-director also crafts some genuinely funny moments of inspired grotesquerie, such as when the grizzled, old-school head chef (Lee Sellars), perched atop a crate in a sea of fountain soda, unleashes a parodic version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before baring his arse – all while the kitchen printer keeps spitting out orders from the restaurant, its metronomic zzzzzt-zzzzzzt-clack making a mockery of the human drama.
These semi-surreal moments reinforce La cocina’s sense that everything on screen might be some kind of waking nightmare, or a purgatory from which its characters long to escape. The movie quotes Henry David Thoreau lamenting the tyranny of industry and the loss of leisure: “This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! … It interrupts my dreams.”
A desire for transcendence, or at least deliverance from the daily grind, permeates the picture. In a gelid meat locker that could be a portal to another dimension, Julia wonders about letting herself go, crossing over to another place to find herself inside nothing. Later, a cook (Motell Gyn Foster) dreams about disappearing, telling the tale of an Ellis Island immigrant saved from deportation via a mysterious green ray that transmitted him to Queens – presumably cosmic intervention, from one alien to another.
It’s a grim world where a supernatural deus ex machina might be considered the only way out, where the alternative is to prosper by learning to play the system. Like the Arab–American boss (Oded Fehr) of The Grill, who provides for his workers but can’t understand – because successful business has made him forget – why they remain unhappy. No amount of pain, personal or political, can halt the flow of commerce. The machine keeps clacking, interrupting our dreams.
La cocina opens in selected cinemas on May 15.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 3, 2025 as "Pressure cooker".
For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.
All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.
There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.
Subscriber exclusive
Send this article to a friend for free.
Share this subscriber exclusive article with a friend or family member using share credits.
