Film review: La Cocina captures the chaos, broken dreams, and camaraderie of a Times Square kitchen
Energetically shot new film explores profound—and timely—issues around undocumented immigrants and class divisions in America
Rooney Mara and Raúl Briones in La Cocina.
La Cocina is at VIFF Centre on December 6 and December 15 to 19
IN LA COCINA, Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios plays the shiny tourist haunts of Times Square off the frenzied subterranean world that keeps them running.
He centres the action on The Grill, where the polished floors and glowing lights of the restaurant give way to a hidden labyrinth of dish pits, food-prep lines, caged wine cellars, and shadowy offices.
Shot in poetic black and white, the film moves with striking visual style between the two settings—the camera following employees down corridors and up fire escapes; capturing clattering plates and squeezing lemons; and zooming in on the culturally diverse faces of the new immigrants who pump out pizzas, pastas, and mass quantities of other tourist fare.
The lyrical opening follows young Estela (Anna Díaz), trying to find her way—without speaking a word of English—to The Grill’s side door to apply for work as an assistant cook. She’s our conduit to Pedro (an unforgettable Raúl Briones), the charismatic but burnt-out cook who comes from her small Mexican town. He’s navigating an affair with waitress Julia (an equally remarkable Rooney Mara, almost unrecognizable in her bad bleach job), who he’s gotten pregnant. Pedro wants her to keep the baby as “the only nice thing to ever come out of this place”, but the enigmatic Julia has other plans. At the same time, the jaded office manager (Eduardo Olmos) is on the lookout for $800 that went missing from last night’s shift.
Riffing loosely on Arnold Wesker’s London-set play The Kitchen, Ruizpalacios uses the frantic workplace and the more intimate relationship between Julia and Pedro to explore ideas around undocumented immigrants, class, and racism in America—issues that, obviously, could not be more Trump-timely.
The bosses dangle promises of helping employees with their “papers” one minute, and the next, they threaten that there are hundreds more immigrants lined up for the people’s jobs. A white American chef screams at the kitchen staff to stop speaking Spanish, while one waitress constantly has to correct people that she’s Dominican, not Mexican. “Guys like that are always looking for a way in,” the manager warns Julia about Pedro.
In one intense and moving conversation between Pedro and Julia, he alludes to her privilege in the relationship, and his own vulnerability. But the script, and Mara, are nuanced enough to show how she’s vulnerable, too. The nagging question is whether they can ever really know or understand each other, or whether the cultural divide and the dehumanizing work stand in their way.
In one of the film’s most inspired scenes, the camera shoots Julia through the glass of the giant, empty aquarium she’s polishing while she talks to Pedro; suddenly, a worker dumps giant lobsters into the water in front of her. As the crustaceans squirm and drop to the bottom, they become metaphors for the human struggle—Pedro pointing out they used to be considered poor man’s food, but now they’re off-limits to anyone but rich tourists.
Yet the mayhem of the kitchen is also so much more interesting than the mundane, manicured tourist world of the restaurant. In one of Ruizpalacios’s most exhilaratingly frenetic sequences, the kitchen staff—whose languages span Haitian French to every Latin American dialect—one-up each other in a swearing match. Sure, everyone’s stuck in a windowless room in a thankless job with broken dreams, but there’s a multicultural underdog camaraderie, work ethic, and friendly chaos that gets somewhere close to what New York City, and America, used to aspire to be. And it’s a credit to Ruizpalacios’s fresh and exciting artistry that he can capture all of that profound stuff in real time, in one cramped cocina. 
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