La Cocina (2024)

La-Cocina-(2024)
La Cocina (2024)

In the magnificent film La Cocina, it is almost hard to miss The Grill, a complete kitchen with its own close ties to the Times Square restaurant. The problem is that this is a fast-food joint with all the bad qualities. However, when the orders start pouring in, the restaurant boasts Italian cuisine that includes lots of chicken marsala and Margherita pizza. Most of the consumers who sit down at one of the New York City ‘The Grill’ restaurants are tourists who are in the capital city, impatient, and want the energy that New York City has to offer. Day to day, dozens of people come in and out of the establishments without ever stopping to appreciate the drama, movement, or people behind the meals.

Considering the recent successes of “The Bear,” it comes as no surprise that Kitchen Drama has become an inthing. The Comfort light, although doesn’t fit the same mold. It depicts how The Grill processes are the product of a poor functioning system, This disposable system takes people only to train someone else how to prepare yet another chicken masala dish with little regard for their replacement perspective.

The recent cuisine films have had a chef and an appropriate one at that, the noble one who can barely hold his head up and get back to catering to the cuisine as its appreciation is fast being lost to the fast food industry,” But La Cocina contains simple ingredients. But La Cocina contains simple ingredients. Everything is needed during these moments, often literally planned by Alonzo Ruizpalacios’ writer/director” So lathes are presented “as marked by frenzied action and the sound caused by chaos. Outperforming a very crowded and resizing kitchen, this is what the camera has set out to do construction, this looks very much dilettante. It’s a profession and an environment in which success is not granted, success is not the objective.

The first one to feature this culinary combat is Ruizpalacios, who replaces the rookie character in Estela (Anna Diaz), an immigrant from Mexico in search of a job in the restaurant. Estela picks up a gig in a hurry as she has already robbed someone of an opportunity to interview them. But “La Cocina” is not really Estela’s story. More than anything, she is interesting in that her tired face keeps making appearances because the camera returns to her. In that way, she is an audience standing: perplexed by the action participant whom the plot throws into the fray just as it happens to the viewers.

The core of the kitchen, “La Cocina”, is a chef called Pedro (the wonderful Raúl Briones), a good-natured man, who is in the thick of the development of lobster as one of the exquisite cuisines and has been on his not-so-soft days apron long enough to clash with people above him. It’s about time. He is the commander of a present squad but always appears to be seconds away from a catastrophe. Ruizpalacios in the narrative gives up some hints of an impending upsurge in chaos in Pedro’s life beginning with a description of a brawl that took place the night before, a room investigation for expenses that were not accounted for on the last day’s till, and some turbulence in his relations with his girlfriend Julia (Rooney Mara, in her usual good form), a Grill waitress who is sexually active and supposedly intending to terminate a pregnancy. As “La Cocina” progresses back and forth to cast the net on these other characters, Pedro and Julia keep the middle of the table, the dish around which the other parts of the menu are fitted.

Briones shines best in ‘La Cocina’ where he provides a large range of performances that can only be described as spellbinding. Pedro is more than tired of the nonsense that life throws at him in a restaurant kitchen in New York City, but being around him is seductive. In a context where most of the men and women he oversees are either fired or deported every few days, he stands out as an active figure. Briones presents the illegal immigrant Pedro as a man in constant, thumping anxiety of an almost bottom-level order, which he definitely is, but possesses southern California-style glamour in plenty. Ruizpalacios and his DP Juan Pablo Ramirez are aware that the most valuable person in their team is Briones, so they quite frequently stop their dynamic movement camera on his unforgettable visage.

Whenever they do switch that camera again, “La Cocina” shifts to an exploration of how to carve out a visual language in this context, which is quite limited. It is based, more or less, on a single set design which, I assume, is a source of references, but in fact it’s a very theatrical work, starting from the black and white colors chosen to the numerous camera shifts employed in order to create imaginative chaos. The movie shoots during lunch hour, so the action is indeed rather frantic, but everything is of course very well arranged and planned out.

The closing moment in “La Cocina” is one of the few times in the film that I couldn’t help but feel the strings being pulled. It is a beautifully integrated monologue, having been delivered perfectly by Briones, although it seems a little over-the-top since climactic moments aren’t found in NYC kitchen life. On the other hand, though, it is a film that at times doesn’t quite stick to the purest of depictions all those camera tricks just mentioned are meant to bring you back to the fact that this is film. One that depicts banal agony and, yes, touches on the mundane charm of the averagely-hopefully-a-little-less-than-averagely kitchen in New York. And considering several locations in and around Times Square’s Grill, it could be the case that they are all rather so functional. After all, Pedro, Julia, Estela, and the rest of the workers may not be anything remarkable or indeed, unique. However, a feature film about them.

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