Berlinale 2024: ‘La Cocina’ is a Chaotic Film About Kitchen Assholes

Berlinale 2024: ‘La Cocina’ is a Chaotic Film About Kitchen Assholes

by Alex Billington
February 23, 2024

Everyone knows that most big restaurant kitchens are a mess. Everyone also knows that restaurant workers are overworked, underpaid, usually some of the most stressed out people on the planet, who work tirelessly where we can’t see them to prepare our food and keep the restaurant running at full speed. There have been a number of good films made about kitchens and restaurant workers recently (Boiling Point and “The Bear” are two of the most prominent) and now there’s another new one to add to that growing subgenre. La Cocina is the latest feature film made by a Mexican filmmaker named Alonso Ruizpalacios, who directs this B&W drama based on the acclaimed stage play by Arnold Wesker. Alas, La Cocina is unfortunately a messy, tiresomely chaotic, frustrating film that is so obsessed with its own chaos that it becomes annoying to sit through, especially the final 30 minutes. Check, please! I don’t want a desert today, I’m ready to leave.

La Cocina is written and directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios, and is set entirely in New York City at a fictional Times Square restaurant called The Grill. It opens with some horribly jittery slow-mo footage of people in NYC, then focuses on a young Mexican immigrant woman who makes her way through the hustle & bustle of Manhattan to the restaurant – hoping to get a job. The rest of the film is set inside the confines of this seedy restaurant – which is clearly a set built on a sound stage with vast, twisted halls and a strangely organized, massive(ly unrealistic) kitchen with 20+ workers inside. The film then bounces from character to character, shifting focus way too often. Finally it settles on the character of Pedro, played by Raúl Briones, another Mexican chef working in the kitchen who seems to command the respect of most of his colleagues. But let’s not beat around the bush – this guy is an asshole. He may seem like a funny, sweet guy who is just joking around, but as the film goes on it’s clear he is really a cocky, arrogant bastard who messes with everyone and causes more chaos in the kitchen than is necessary. Why does he have to be the main character in this film?!

What bothers me the most about La Cocina is that almost everyone else found in the kitchen – or on the staff at all – pretty much anyone in the restaurant, is an asshole. And there’s not enough excuses to be made for “that’s the point!” They can’t all be annoying, can they? Is there someone nice working there (aside from the initial woman Estela, which the film completely ignores for most if its runtime)? After finding the most charismastic worker, Pedro, to keep the camera pointed at for most of the running time, the film then shifts into an uncomfortable storyline about his awkward, overbearing relationship with a waitress woman named Julia, played by Rooney Mara. Despite coming across as smart and kind, she apparently cannot resist the asshole manliness of Pedro, and despite numerous examples of his abusive, explosive, harmful attitude, we discover they’re having a secret restaurant affair and there is perhaps even something more going on. What point does this storyline have? Why does it be the focus of a film that’s supposed to be about the craziness of restaurant kitchens? I have no idea. Ruizpalacios doesn’t seem to know either – he got lost all his hallways.

As much as I wanted to enjoy La Cocina, as much as I respect and appreciate all of the chefs and restaurant workers out there, this film is an exceptional let down. Just because this film is as chaotic and as messy as a real restaurant kitchen does not make it good. Too many ingredients stuffed into an overlong, meandering plot that needs at least 30 minutes cut. There’s a good point where it could’ve ended, but it decides to keep rambling on. The fest’s description says that Ruizpalacios’s film is “a tragic and comic tribute to the invisible people who prepare our food.” However, ultimately it is not a tribute to restaurant workers as much as it is a look at kitchen trashiness. It’s the kind of film that will make you want to stay away from most restaurants, revealing all the careless, disgusting behind-the-scenes secrets that Anthony Bourdain put in his book years ago. It’s the kind of cinema that’ll make you feel sick by the end, because you wasted two hours sitting in a theater when you could’ve been enjoying a nice meal at a much better restaurant than the one depicted on screen. Check the rating of this place before you go out – and book a reservation at somewhere else instead.

Alex’s Berlinale 2024 Rating: 4 out of 10
Follow Alex on Twitter – @firstshowing / Or Letterboxd – @firstshowing

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