#Berlin: All the World’s A Kitchen in Rooney Mara Starrer ‘La Cocina’

It was when Alonso Ruizpalacios was in London working as a dishwasher at the (now-extinct) Rainforest Cafe that he came up with the idea for La Cocina.

“I was a drama student and I’d just read the [1957] play The Kitchen by Arnold Wesker and to make the work — which is tough, monotonous and very, very hard — bearable, I’d look at it through the creative lens of the play. If you see how a kitchen works, you realize it is much like the world, like [how] society works. Wesker says for Shakespeare all the world is a stage, whereas for him all the world is a kitchen.”

It was decades later, after success with Mexican films like Museo and A Cop Movie, that Ruizpalacios came back to the idea, taking The Kitchen as the jumping-off point for his English-language debut, transferring the action from late-’50s London to modern-day New York. While the rough plot follows that of Wesker’s play, the characters, dialog and the structure of the film are Ruizpalacios’ own.

La Cocina, which premieres in competition in Berlin on Friday, Feb. 16, is set in The Grill, a huge restaurant off Times Square where immigrants, mostly illegal, slave away in the back room to serve up plate after plate of awful food to unsuspecting tourists. A Cop Movie alum Raúl Briones is Pedro, a short-order cook in love with American waitress Julia, played by Rooney Mara. In the middle of the lunch rush, The Grill’s manager notices money has gone missing from the till, and the undocumented Pedro is the prime suspect.

Ruizpalacios, who combines documentary and fictional staging in his features, did extensive research in New York kitchens for the film, recording interviews with undocumented cooks, cleaners and wait staff.

“It’s a whole other side of New York, going into these kitchens, which are just full of Mexicans,” he says. “One told me: ‘All the food in New York is Mexican food.’ There’s no Japanese, no Chinese, no Greek food. It’s all Mexican. Because it’s all made by Mexicans. And most of them from one state, Puebla.”

La Cocina begins with Estela (Anna Díaz), a recent immigrant, getting off the subway in a chilly Manhattan winter and making her way to The Grill in search of work.

“It’s a metaphor for the migrant’s journey, but it ended up being more than that,” says Ruizpalacios, “because Anna had never been outside Mexico and just getting her into the U.S., getting her a visa, bringing her over, took more than two years. That was a movie in itself.”

The opening scene was shot documentary-style. Díaz was given subway fare and the address of The Grill and, speaking no English and never having set foot in New York before, was sent off from Brooklyn to find her way, shivering in a light sweater — “none of these migrants are prepared for the weather,” notes Ruizpalacios — to Times Square.

While there are plenty of Mexican films about undocumented immigration to the U.S., most, says Ruizpalacios, focus on the journey North. “I wanted to show what happens after the journey, what happens when they arrive, what happens to their American Dream,” he says. “So this is the story of Mexico, but it’s also the story of the United States, the story of all these immigrants who travel there, chasing this dream. But what happens on the other side, what is the price of this dream?”

In The Grill, at least, the American Dream is long gone. Ruizpalacios depicts the lunch rush as a hellscape of dog-eat-dog competition among cooks, cleaners and wait staff, all battling to survive — and all overseen by the strict hierarchy of the Chef (Lee R. Sellars), restaurant owner Rashid (Oded Fehr) and manager Nonzo (Motell Foster).

“The kitchen is like a caste system — hierarchy is not taken lightly there,” says the dishwasher-turned-director. “It’s a place everyone can be friends and talk and laugh, but when rush hour comes, it’s every man for himself. Seeing that firsthand is brutal. No one will help you out, it is lonely and competitive. So, of course, it’s the perfect metaphor for late-stage capitalism.”

At one point, a faulty drinks machine starts pumping out Cherry Coke, drenching the kitchen in a flood of near-biblical proportions.

While there is a lot of cooking in La Cocina, none of the results look very appetizing. Ruizpalacios shoots the food preparation scenes in harsh neon light and has his cinematographer Juan Pablo Ramírez weave the camera in and out with the hectic energy of a war reporter in the midst of combat.

“Over the last couple of years there has been a fascination with kitchens,” says Ruizpalacios, pointing to films like The Menu and The Taste of Things, or Emmy-winning series The Bear. “But if you look down cinema history, there’ve always been films revolving around the act of cooking, because it’s such a human activity. One thing I think sets this film apart, though, is it’s not a food-porn film. In fact, it’s an anti-food-porn film. The food they cook at The Grill is shit food, and I show how shit it is. The only food porn moment in the film is when Pedro makes a sandwich for Julia. It’s the only moment where making food becomes an act of love. That I shot like Chef’s Table.”

In a twist on the migrant story of the film, Ruizpalacios shot all the interiors for La Cocina in Mexico, building a multistory set of the restaurant and kitchen. He brought the entire cast down to Mexico City for three weeks to rehearse before the eight-week shoot.

“We were a real theater troupe, we had all these Americans, a French Moroccan, an Albanian, the Haitians — who are the dishwashers — and of course all the Mexicans,” says Ruizpalacios. “It was a real melting pot. It was really important for me to shoot this film in Mexico, to invert the situation in a way, and bring the Americans down here.”

“It was a really unique ensemble experience, unlike anything I’ve done before,” adds Mara, who says Ruizpalacios’ theater-style working method, along with the La Cocina script, convinced her to take on the role of Julia. “After I met with him, I just really wanted to work with him,” she says. “Just the way Alonso talked about how he wanted to make this movie, how he worked with actors, got me excited to be in this film.”

Unlike Ruizpalacios, Mara had little service experience. “I was a bartender for like two nights. I went to bartending school, which is like a three-day course, not a real school,” she says, “and it was actually really fun and interesting, [but] I was a terrible bartender. I lasted those two nights and that was the end of my bartending career.” 

Some sequences in the film are entirely improvised — “the staff meal where everyone’s talking about the theft, none of that was scripted,” Ruizpalacios says — but there are also carefully choreographed scenes. Like that lunch rush, a 14-minute sequence done in a single Steadicam shot.

“The lunch rush scene was done over maybe a week, it was really specific and exact, and pretty challenging to shoot,” recalls Mara, “especially when the floor was full of 10 inches of Cherry Coke. But it was also exhilarating. Like a fun, crazy dance.”

But Ruizpalacios says he had Mara in mind for his American waitress, Julia, early on. Years before he wrote the La Cocina script, he was in New York with his wife on Christmas Eve and, with nothing to do, they went to the movies.

“As I approached the concessionary to buy popcorn, I noticed that the rug was soaking wet,” says Ruizpalacios. “I looked and saw the Cherry Coke machine was just an endless fountain. Nobody was even paying attention. The staff were just serving people and pretending it wasn’t there. When someone needed a Cherry Coke, they’d just scoop the cup in the pool and hand it over. I thought: ‘Wow, this is the perfect image of late-stage capitalism. It has to go in my movie.’ And the film we went to see that night was The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo with Rooney Mara. So I think it was meant to be.”