Amidst the lunch rush of a frantic Manhattan restaurant, a series of events threaten to bring the kitchen to a crashing halt.

While food orders flood in and pressure mounts to boiling point, the passionate relationship between chef Pedro (Raul Briones) and waitress Julia (Rooney Mara) is starting to fray. But when missing money and shocking revelations cause things to spiral out of control, it’s not long before one of New York’s busiest kitchens is on the verge of imploding.

Featuring an array of outstanding performances led by Briones and Mara, La Cocina is a gripping, exhilarating, and truly cinematic new film from acclaimed director Alonso

Ruizpalacios.

The Garden Cinema View:

La Cocina will inevitably draw comparisons to the likes of Boiling Point and The Bear but, high-kitchen-anxiety aside, this is quite a different concoction. Alonso Ruizpalacios is less interested in the success of a restaurant than he is in presenting a convincing demonstration of a soul-grinding capitalist system and addressing the specific immigrant experiences of those who staff many hospitality establishments. The film’s stage origins, the limited location, and single day setting, all allow Ruizpalacios the foundation to (albeit didactically) showcase these sobering themes.

The restaurant featured here is a masterful labyrinth of service corridors, industrial fridges, and frozen back alleys; the kitchen area itself is a kind of broiling hellscape, ever on the edge of ignition. This space is explored by Juan Pablo Ramirez's fluid and serpentine monochrome cinematography. This ultra stylised sheen turns the set piece ‘service rush’ sequences into surreally graceful choreography, closer to the likes of Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover than films such as Boiling Point. Such formalism removes us from the stress of the action, and to a degree some of the emotion, but again serves to bring us closer to the director’s key themes.

Cast:
Raúl Briones, Rooney Mara Anna Diaz, Motell Foster, Oded Fehr