LA CUCINA - CAMBRIDGE FILM FESTIVAL
If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the cinema. That should have been an audience warning before watching the kitchen-based movie La Cocina at the Cambridge Film Festival. To use the term ‘roller-coaster ride’ would be to overstate any Big Dipper. This was a hold-on-to-your-seat rocket launch, one of the most powerful I’ve seen for a long time.
Directed and written by Alonso Ruizpalacios (now added to my pantheon of cine-geniuses) it is inspired by Arnold Wesker’s 1957 play, ‘The Kitchen’. It explores the human dimension behind the chaos of a diner on tourist Time Square in present-day New York.
We follow the trials and tribulations (squared) of a rookie cook who like most of the kitchen staff are illegals from Latino countries. When I say ‘follow’, I mean this literally.
Cinematographer Juan Pablo Ramirez uses hand-helds to follow the F1-speed action behind the scenes. He shoots it in a vivid monochrome which successfully gives the action a kind of heightened reality. There are moments when the camera speeds are slowed down so that the hectic dashing of waiting staff racing to attend impatient customers are seen as a fuzzy blur. It is thrilling.
We were told before the movie that this was a warts-and-all look behind the scenes of the tourist eatery and that the plot was not so important. This could not be further from the truth. There is an intense and deeply moving narrative concerning a Mexican cook Pedro, his pregnant WASP girlfriend Julia (a waitress in the joint), and the business of some stolen cash. Raúl Briones Carmona is outstanding as the accused man, would-be partner and desperate illegal. His nature is super volatile, his temper simmers like the boiling pans on his stove and occasionally he lashes out uncontrollably. His immediate boss, the Chef (top notch role played by Lee Sellars) has almost had enough of this tempestuous man.
The kitchen is also staffed by Latinos, people of colour, Albanians and one or two very edgy and angry white Americans. ‘There is no such country as America’, bellows Pedro to his white racist nemesis. This does not go down well.
Amid the chaos in hell’s kitchen (at one time awash as though Noah’s flood had come down in retribution for the sins of the owner), there is a quiet moment. A small group of staff sit in the foul alleyway behind the Time Square glitz. As they smoke and ruminate, they tell of their dreams. It is a touching intermezzo between the Dante-esque scenes of the steaming purgatory called La Cocina.
The whole ensemble of actors is outstanding and though this all sounds tragic, there are moments of genuine humour as the employees rib and tease each other with a string of raucous Spanish insults. Take a notebook as some of these could be useful on your next encounter on the Costa del Sol.
The camera draws you in so that you are a participant rather than an onlooker. You desperately want the mercurial Pedro to be happy with his lover Julia. He wants to become a loving father and husband. You see that behind the pain and hot temper is a man who could become both those things. The film’s devastating climax with its wonderful musical underscore draws on church-like imagery to remind us that behind every bagel is a Breughel. I left the cinema elated but exhausted. You have been warned.
