La cocina
The temperature is cranked up in a Times Square restaurant in Alonso Ruizpalacios’ take on Arnold Wesker’s 1957 play.
Rooney Mara and Raúl Briones
Image courtesy of Picturehouse Entertainment.
Back in 2008 the Mexican filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios made a short entitled Café paraíso. He wrote it as well as directing and the fact that this first screen story of his was set in the kitchen of a café may help to explain why his latest feature should be La cocina. On the face of it, this is a surprising piece to emerge and for more than one reason. Although it focuses on staff working in a restaurant known as The Grill which is located in Times Square, New York, the piece is in fact the director’s adaptation of a stage work written in 1957 by the British playwright Arnold Wesker and inspired by Wesker’s own experiences when employed as a cook in Norwich. Furthermore, the nature of the play is such that it is not one that readily suggests suitability for the cinema screen. Nevertheless, La cocina is the second such treatment since James Hill directed a modest but gallant movie version in 1961which retained the original title of The Kitchen.
Wesker was a dramatist with strong social concerns and The Kitchen which was his very first play in a long career was a work in which the pressures imposed on employees in a kitchen were portrayed in a way that attacked capitalism and showed employees of various nationalities being exploited for commercial ends. That was powerfully conveyed on stage (a production of The Kitchen at London's Royal Court theatre in 1961 directed by John Dexter was something of a theatrical landmark) and the theme seems no less pertinent when moved to America in the present day. Indeed, the way in which the manager (Oded Fehr) encourages his foreign staff to stay on by promising that he will soon be able to obtain visas for them is even more forceful in this new context. In theory, then, one can understand why a man who started out by making Café paraíso should want to resurrect The Kitchen in a new film version. But the fact is that Wesker's work was specifically designed for stage performance to the extent that it loses its inner essence away from the theatre.
While the social comment behind the play was patently important to Wesker, it was not that in itself which made The Kitchen an important piece of theatre. Its standing is primarily based on it having represented a major development in creating a new sense of realism in theatre. The work has a large cast of characters comprising the full range of kitchen staff from chefs to waitresses as well as those involved in the administration. Special emphasis was given to two employees who in La cocina become a Mexican chef named Pedro (Raúl Briones) and the waitress, Julia (Rooney Mara), who is expecting his child but is considering an abortion. In a standard piece that drama would be the main feature and the kitchen would become background, but Wesker was in effect reversing that by making the preparation and the subsequent strain of the work the prime focus. As Dexter's production brilliantly demonstrated, the audience was made to feel that they were witnessing something so close to the actuality of kitchen life that it went beyond a mere enactment of it. If Dexter handled this in such a way as to twice build up to a powerful crescendo, he also showed great sensitivity in the contrasted middle section which, retained here by Ruizpalacios, features a post-lunch break in which some of the employees, relaxed at last, reveal their dreams and hopes.
Since The Kitchen is constructed in this way, it is an ensemble piece and the able cast selected for this film has been adroitly chosen. The faces are apt and the film opts for authenticity in mixing English with other languages, especially Spanish, that reflect the nationalities of the employees (much of the movie is subtitled). However, cinema is a naturally realistic medium and that means that the stage play’s generalised impression of the workplace which carried everything before it and became a tour-de-force does not work in the same way here. There are so many characters that on screen we feel the need for them to be established more fully, each one readily identifiable, and that is all the more so because Ruizpalacios opts indulgently for a running length of 139 minutes. It is the case that his approach is one that gives the impression of this being a conscious attempt to aspire to high art and his direction, not least his use of camera movement, often has distinction. But at the same time, one questions certain decisions. Being a contemporary work the choice of photographing it in black-and-white seems odd and it feels strange when in certain scenes one finds the ratio changing - in addition to which a touch of colour is sometimes added albeit rarely.
Aside from the two leads, one notes strong supporting performances from such players as Eduardo Olmos, Soundos Mosbah, Lee Sellars and Anna Diáz but the basic fact is that the impact overall is much less than it should be because Ruizpalacios has found no cinematic approach with a strong, inherent appeal of its own that would hold the viewer and thus minimise our desire for clearer portrayals of the individuals on screen. It could be argued that a more drastic rewrite was required if that were to be achieved, but in any case I was haunted by a somewhat comparable film which, while unassociated with Wesker’s play, nevertheless did echo several aspects of it. That piece worked by finding an approach that was as much pure cinema as The Kitchen is pure theatre: I refer to the 2021 film which triumphed by adopting the tactic of being shot in a single take, Boiling Point.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Raúl Briones, Rooney Mara, Anna Diáz, Soundos Mosbah, Oded Fehr, Lee Sellars, Motell Foster, Laura Gomez, Eduardo Olmos, Spenser Granese, James Waterston, Pía Laborde-Noguez.
Dir Alonso Ruizpalacios, Pro Ramiro Ruiz, Gerardo Gatica, Alonso Ruizpalacios, Lauren Mann and Ivan Orlic, Screenplay Alonso Ruizpalacios from the play The Kitchen by Arnold Wesker, Ph Juan Pablo Ramirez, Pro Des Sandra Cabriada, Ed Yibran Asuad, Music Tomás Barreiro, Costumes Adela Cortázar.
Filmadora/Panorama/Astrakan Film/Sein Picturs/Fifth Season-Picturehouse Entertainment.
139 mins. Mexico/USA. 2024. US Rel: 25 October 2024. UK Rel: 28 March 2025. Cert. 15.
