Suspicion among the saucepans, the simmer and sizzle of illicit sex, the sharp, spiced tongue of culinary lingus, all mix and mingle in LA COCINA, a no restraint restaurant drama.
The Grill is a big tourist trap eatery in the centre of New York City, where immigrants seek work because they are taken in without papers and the tips are good. The work is hard, and the food is awful.
Based on Arnold Wesker’s kaleidoscopic opus, The Kitchen, LA COCINA is an exhilarating and truly cinematic new film from acclaimed director Alonso Ruizpalacios.
Set amidst the frantic lunch rush, a series of events threaten to bring the kitchen to a crashing halt. While food orders flood in and pressure mounts to boiling point, the passionate relationship between chef Pedro and waitress Julia is spinning out of control. Adding to the spiral, missing money from the restaurant till among other shocking revelations bring the kitchen to the verge of imploding.
A multicultural melting pot, in many ways LA COCINA is about spiritual homelessness. The character’s condition of illegal immigrants is just that: a condition, a circumstance, a given. But what they’re really struggling with is to find a sense of self, of community and brotherhood in the midst of hard labour.
Indeed, work is the central ingredient in LA COCINA, the struggle for the survival of the soul as well as the body amidst the unstoppable machinery of global capitalism.
All would be aware of the apocryphal stories of spiteful spiting into patron’s food, but the reality is that the plates are innocuously seasoned with sweat and the blood of the medium-rare steak that goes off to table is actually the cook’s blood, who made a near-fatal mistake, all because of the pressure.
Like Wesker’s play, the language is raw and demotic, groping towards a parlance poetry. The thronged, clangorous, ill ventilated restaurant kitchen is a metaphor for the dehumanising world of commercialism and mass production, the daily collision of people with economic necessity, repetitive toil, a Sisyphean slavery.
A hard, taxing and complex work, with a fantastic ensemble led by Raúl Briones and Rooney Mara and stunning black and white cinematography by Juan Pablo Ramirez, LA COCINA is well worth a look.
