The new Alonso Ruizpalacios film La Cocina is the movie we didn’t know we were waiting for: a dazzling day-in-the-life exploration of the immigrant crisis that globalists have unleashed on the West.
Set behind the scenes in the kitchen of The Grill, an upscale Midtown Manhattan restaurant, La Cocina is adapted from British playwright Arnold Wesker’s 1957 drama The Kitchen but shows Ruizpalacios rethinking that little-known classic. The active term “rethinking” describes how La Cocina appeals to our cinematic as well as political interests. Not just the film of the year, it is an inspiration.
Multiple characters, crossing several countries to pursue skilled and unskilled careers, converge in New York City — where the idea of ethnic diversity not only defines its history but now has become a political weapon created by a government-sponsored invasion that New York’s current mayor has said “will destroy this city.” That threat keeps the entire film in suspense.
Ruizpalacios, whose previous films Güeros, Museo, and A Cop Movie explored Mexico City tensions, here observes the pressures of international diversity — between cultures, the sexes, and castes. Petite immigrant Estela (Anna Díaz) arrives from Mexico looking for work promised by family friend Pedro (Raúl Briones), who is a line chef for The Grill, owned by Muslim entrepreneur Rashid (Oded Fehr). Pedro’s ambition includes his romance with blonde American waitress Julia (Rooney Mara), whose pregnancy will directly affect his drive and assimilation.
These relationships shuffle among the large, contentious staff — Mexican, white, Italian, black, Muslim, Albanian, and Dominican, a panoply of types whose individuality keeps the action lively, timely, yet unpredictable.
Ruizpalacios transforms theatrical naturalism: Estela encounters the infamous pizza rat, a street poet’s spoken-word rhyme confusing the meaning of “Times Square,” and sees herself in the tumult of situations and behaviors connected to employment and self-sufficiency. Ruizpalacios couches sociological points in personal motivation, just as he did in his remarkable debut film Güeros. But La Cocina draws deepest insights from Wesker, who anticipated the thrilling, real-life social dynamics we associate with Robert Altman and Mike Leigh.
Wesker (1932–2016) was renowned as British theater’s first adept to “dramatize work” (derived from England’s socialist sympathies). In The Kitchen, Wesker tracked the decorum from friendly badinage to hostile vernacular that co-workers sustain just to get through the day. (Wesker may not rank with Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, but his double-edged employee-to-supervisor line “Who’d want to kill you?” is worthy of Terence Rattigan, John Osborne, or Noël Coward.) Ruizpalacios updates these details, evoking the globalist stress of native and foreign figures struggling to tolerate their rivals.
Without directly addressing the World Economic Forum’s population makeover, La Cocina observes its effect — in the working-class hierarchy, personal interactions, and differences between natives and immigrants. Pedro and Julia are drawn by opposites-attract lust. The macho ardency of appetitive Pedro matches Julia’s feminine ambivalence. Their mutual groping, filmed in blue light, could be the most frank miscegenation ever put on film. Not quite a love story, theirs — with its paired selfishness — is a common, realist tragedy.
Ruizpalacios’s imagery (shot by Juan Pablo Ramírez) evokes Godard’s Breathless — from Pedro’s deep alienation (“I’m fucked up in the soul, which is harder to fix”) to Julia’s striped-dress pregnancy. But he goes further than Godard when he depicts the cynicism of Julia’s coffee-break abortion in bloody detail.
The moral frankness of La Cocina’s black-and-white palette recalls not only Breathless; it surpasses Alfonso Cuarón’s fatuous peasant melodrama Roma, intentionally reproving its Millennial sentimentality about class and labor. The mostly Spanish, bilingual dialogue presents our Millennial Babel: A chorale of the kitchen’s casual, diverse profanity lists Brooke Shields, mariachi, fag, lout, chump, nitwit, f***face, bonehead, simpleton, miscreant, pipsqueak. It’s pop parlance authentic to the new world that perplexes Pedro: “You keep calling it America, but America is not a country.”
Here’s where La Cocina bests the liberal, fake-realist snark of The Bear TV series, a workplace debauch that literalizes “kitchen sink” realism. Wesker understood the complexity of working-class politics. The scene of a bum given a free meal featured a startling exchange in which his “Got a cigarette?” request was answered with “Yeah and I’m smoking it.” Ruizpalacios changes it for pathos, omitting the forthright working-class temper that made Wesker’s writing so amazing.
The sentimentality in La Cocina is all too contemporary. It weakens Pedro’s climactic tantrum when defending his place in the kitchen as proletarian revenge. The scene’s bravura showmanship outdoes Cuarón’s fondness for one-take flashiness, but Ruizpalacios’s scullery flood omits Wesker’s unforgettable “Wring my shirt. That’s not sweat, no man carries that much water.” We lose Wesker’s wisdom about capitalism — dreams vs. hopes — that today’s invaders don’t seem to countenance.
When Pedro wrecks the restaurant’s receipt machine, his boss exclaims, “You stopped my world? Why? What more is there?” After Wesker, class war has come down to narcissism. Ruizpalacios justifies worker resentment through oversimplification (adding Estela’s complicit smile). Like Mookie’s payback demand that ruined Do the Right Thing, it’s a Millennial liberal misreading of what Wesker understood about the colonialist burden of post–World War II Britain.
La Cocina is great when it entertains that burden — in the individual conflicts of its multi-culti dramatis personae, through crescendos of work frenzy and the kinds of confession that few playwrights and filmmakers know how to do anymore. A reverie by Mexican worker Chava (Bernardo Velasco) about white women/gringas (“They’re made with care. Out of this world! Like fancy stores and brand-new cars!”) recalls Philip Roth’s outsider awe (“How’d they get that way?”) in Portnoy’s Complaint. Yet its specific cultural disclosure is Ruizpalacios’s closest reading of Wesker. A complementary monologue by black pastry chef Nonzo (Motell Foster) addresses Ellis Island immigration too obviously, although it might have worked had Nonzo’s off-time musing seemed stoned, rather than the film’s only portentous moment.
La Cocina feels original. While certainly inspired by Wesker’s vision, Ruizpalacios responds to the “America is not a country” invasion calamity that some recognize as the biggest crime in the history of the United States of America. But so far, no other filmmaker has responded. (Immigration echoes poorly in the upcoming Blitz and The Brutalist.) The genius of Wesker’s play rescues the liberalism of La Cocina. When it’s good, the sharpness and daring rectify the media’s lies about our broken border and make it the Altman movie we’ve longed for.