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La Cocina
In a New York tourist restaurant in Times Square called “The Grill,“ chefs from all over the world toil away in piecework. Agit-prop based on a play by Arnold Wesker.
Alonso Ruizpalacios’ film is based on a play by Arnold Wesker from the 50s and cultivates a theatricality of its own. The studio set, which represents the New York tourist restaurant on Times Square “The Grill,” is a twisty labyrinth reminiscent of Kafka’s “The Trial” on one hand, and a big stage on the other – primarily the huge kitchen with work stations, wherein chefs (just a couple of them female) from all over the world work, and the place where the waitresses in their striped dresses perform a precise choreography. Estela (Anna Diaz), a Mexican immigrant without papers, is the guide to this world. She’s looking for Pedro (Raúl Briones Carmona) who comes from her village and turns out to be the agonized anti-hero of the story. He is lively, aggressive, and on edge, especially since waitress Julia (Rooney Mara) is expecting a child from him and wants to have an abortion. What’s worse, the money from the cash register is gone, the suspicion falls on Pedro – and the legalization of his status, which his boss dangles in front of his nose like a carrot, seems further and further away because of it.
LA COCINA is less a film that is telling a story than a sequence of agit prop “set pieces” which are each staged as a kind of dance of cinematic means and characters. Ruizpalacios uses choirs, slow motion, stop motion, blurs and free-floating quotes that could have come from off-screen but also from the guy Estela meets on the subway. The first dialogue between Julia and Pedro is choreographed around a lobster aquarium as a dance between two wage earners around the perverse, still-living luxury food. Later, Pedro, who repeatedly questions the capitalist status quo in the company like a kind of Jesus with anger management problems, serves the lobster to a homeless man and almost loses his job because of it. At first it has drive, the formal experiments make you curious, but the longer the 2 and a half hour film goes on for, the more you miss independent characters who develop, and the precision in narrative that makes cinema possible.
Hendrike Bake (INDIEKINO MAGAZIN)
Translation: Elinor Lewy
Original title: La Cocina
USA/Mexiko 2024, 139 min
Language: Spanish, English
Genre: Drama
Director: Alonso Ruizpalacios
Author: Arnold Wesker
DOP: Juan Pablo Ramírez
Montage: Yibrán Asuad
Music: Tomás Barreiro
Distributor: SquareOne
Cast: Rooney Mara, Oded Fehr, John Pyper-Ferguson, Laura Gómez, James Waterston, Spenser Granese
FSK: 16
Release: 16.01.2025
Website
Screenings
- OV Original version
- OmU Original with German subtitles
- OmeU Original with English subtitles
- OV Original version
- OmU Original with German subtitles
- OmeU Original with English subtitles

La cocina
(La Cocina) | USA/Mexiko 2024 | Drama | R: Alonso Ruizpalacios | FSK: 16
In a New York tourist restaurant in Times Square called “The Grill,“ chefs from all over the world toil away in piecework. Agit-prop based on a play by Arnold Wesker.
Friedrichshain
b-ware! ladenkino
Tuesday 18.02.
TicketsBuy Tickets OmeU18:10
ALLE ANGABEN OHNE GEWÄHR.
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