Alonso Ruizpalacios’ new movie La Cocina is charming. It has many elements we have never thought about in a new independent film. Best part? It isn’t about the actors or the director’s vision. The focus is on the pain of uprooting oneself. In terms of plot, La Cocina tells the immigrant crisis that globalists unacceptably brought into the West.
La Cocina is based on British playwright Arnold Wesker’s 1957 drama The Kitchen but depicts Ruizpalacios’s own re-imagining of the lesser-known classic. It would be more correct to say La Cocina, drift. It does not only encompass the aesthetic but also explores political lacunae within the society. This is not only about the film of the year. It is a motivational speech.
In their quest for both highly and poorly-paid jobs, many of them eventually came to New York. A city, the official history of which has long been built around the idea of successful multiculturalism but in recent years it has looked more like a planned invasion, and its current mayor has endlessly frightened people stating it would ‘ruin the entire city’. The entire movie revolves around that horror.
Ruizpalacios, who has previously tackled with the issues of Mexico City in Melodramas’ like ‘Güeros’, ‘Museo’, ‘A Cop Movie’, in this case simply follows the logic of international interaction cultural, gender, and caste interaction. From Mexico, petite immigrant Estela (Anna Díaz) comes looking for the job that family friend Pedro (Raúl Briones), a line cook at the Grill owned by Muslim Rashid (Oded Fehr), promised her. Pedro dreams of bolting in America and marrying Julia (Rooney Mara), a waitress in America who is pregnant for him and this drives him crazy.
These relations are combined with the numerous bickering: the Mexican, white, Italian, Negro Muslim, Albanian, Dominican personnel of the restaurant–all characters with their attributes, and they add spice, appear right in the essence of events but in its unpredictable way.
Ruizpalacios puts in a blender theatrical naturalism: Estela meets the controversial pizza rat, a street poet reciting confusingly in relation to the collocation ‘Times Square’ and all these misheuristic circumstances and associations with work and self-growth draw on her temper. Ruizpalacios develops complex social issues through individual passions as he did in the wonderful first film called Güeros. Much more delights from La Cocina draw deep understanding from Wesker because it expected the most exciting aspect of social constructs which today is so familiar with Robert Altman and Mike Leigh.
Wesker (1932–2016) was famous as the first British theatre artist who put into practice the concept of “dramaturgical work” (the legacy of socialist movements in England). In The Kitchen, Wesker distinguishes the manners of friendly petty jesting to the use of curse terms that people who are off-duty employ and put up with just to end the day. (Wesker may not be in competition with Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, but his two sided worker-to-manager rendition “Who’d want to kill you?” can be regarded William Terence Rattigan, John Osborne or Noël Coward). Ruizpalacios broadens these images, appealing to the globalist anxiety of local and alien figures trying to outdo each other.
Without openly focusing on the WEF’s project of population displacement, La Cocina depicts its impact on the location of working class, the interpersonal relations, and the assimilation of the natives with the foreigners. Pedro and Julia’s attraction is stronger because of their differences. The strong hunger-striking macho of Pedro fits the femininity of ambivalent Julia perfectly. Their touching each other in blue light may be the most honest and extreme racial intermarriage ever caught on camera. Past the envisaged happy-victory ending, theirs, a love narrative, with its dual opportunism is a typical, realistic tragedy.
Juan Pablo Ramirez shot Ruizpalacios’ imagery, which evokes Godard’s Breathless, starting with Pedro’s deep alienation (‘I’m fucked up in the soul, which is a little more difficult to fix’) and Julia’s striped pregnancy dress. Yet he surpasses even Godard in the graphic description of Julia’s coffee-break post-abortion as simply pure cynicism.
In terms of its rich moral palette in black and white swathes, La Cocina draws not only from Breathless but also goes beyond Alfonso Cuarón’s absurdist peasant-melodrama Roma, seeking to ironically scorn the millennial class and labor nostalgia. The predominantly Spanish, bilingual, dialogue introduces us to our millennial tower of babel: A song of the kitchen’s liberal language including Brooke Shields, mariachi fag, oaf, fool, dunderhead, fretch, half-wit, scoundrel, squirt. It is strange new world vulgarity that baffles Pedro’s take: ‘You keep calling it America, but America is not a A land or a singular people.’
Where La Cocina has an edge over the self aware liberal faux realist snark of The Bear TV series a nauseating authorial excess in the phrase ‘kitchen sink’ tales. Wesker knew that things were far more complicated in the lives of the working class, politically and otherwise. The episode of a derelict once offered a complimentary supper contained the shocking line exchange ‘got a cigarette?’ in which the reply came ‘yeah and I’m smoking it’. Ruizpalacios alters it for pathos, cutting out the blunt working class humour that shaped so many of Wesker’s works.
La cocina has too much heaviness and emotional appeal for the likes of us contemporary viewers. It reduces the power of the scene where Pedro angrily defends his position in the kitchen as a means of self-righteous vengeance. Still, out of all in this picture, the overwhelming pageantry of THIS SCENE surpasses Cuarón’s appreciation for executing sequence shots. However Ruizpalacios’s, dolly-grind the stoves til they spin around the pole in Wesker’s legendary “twist my shirt. No man can be that saturated, it’s not physical water.” We lose the lesson Wesker had about capitalism aspirations versus belief system which, according to the new invaders, is irrelevant nowadays.
“Have I previously prevented you from carrying out something? What’s the more?” Yeltsin then replies upon smashing the receipt machine of the restaurant. And after Wesker, class struggle is reduced to narcissisms. Ruizpalacios explains the rage of the workers in rather simplistic terms, and adds the stage direction of Estela’s slightly cold smile. Upon seeing that he had already passed the point of no return, Mookie from Do the Right Thing makes Kevin spin. This is what Millennial liberalism has mistook of what Wesker had to say regarding British colonial imperialism in the post-World War II context.
La Cocina does well when it has to shoulder that responsibility–and this is particularly seen in the individual conflicts of its multi-culti dramatis personae, in the ever growing textures of work obsession and the tawda which few if any playwrights and filmmakers are capable of doing in this age. The reverie includes a Mexican worker, Chava (Bernardo Velasco) fantasizing about white ladies or gringas which he referred to as, “They are made with care, and out of this world! Just like fancy stores and new cars!” This brings to mind Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s complaint which features the themed aspect of ‘how they got that way’ from his perspective that allows him to be an outsider. Nevertheless, its particular cultural revelation is Ruizpalacios’s best interpretation of Wesker. Nonzo’s address of Ellis Island immigration in a related but complementary monologue is also too blatant but might have worked had Nonzo’s thoughts after work seemed zapped instead of being the dullest moment of the entire film.
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