La Cocina review – Rooney Mara gets stuck in in New York restaurant kitchen drama

Here is a strangely exhausting movie, quaintly imagining the frenzied atmosphere of a New York restaurant kitchen as a microcosm of exploited migrant workers, full of macho shouting and self-conscious acting, with every speech a drama school audition piece. The Mexican film-maker Alonso Ruizpalacios has given us some terrific work in the past, such as his debut Güeros, his drama-thriller Museum and his rather amazing docudrama A Cop Movie, but I couldn’t make friends with this strained and histrionic picture. It is in English and Spanish, shot in black-and-white, but sometimes shifting to different colour filters, and inspired by The Kitchen, the 1957 stage play by Arnold Wesker.

Raúl Briones (who was an officer in A Cop Movie) plays Pedro, one of the chefs, a hot-tempered guy who has already had a brawl in the kitchen the previous night. Anna Díaz plays Estela, a hometown friend who got her job there through Pedro, while Rooney Mara plays Julia, a waitress with whom Pedro is in love and whom he has got pregnant though she may not feel quite as strongly about him. The always tense mood of the kitchen is made worse when the hatchet-faced management declare that $800 is missing from the till, about the sum that Pedro has somehow found so Julia can have an abortion. With all sorts of other tensions and grievances swirling around, Pedro’s emotions are ready to blow like a pressure cooker.

The underlying situation of the missing money is resolved in the most outrageously unconvincing way: and at the end you are entitled to ask why, if Pedro wants Julia to have the baby, is he giving her this money? And even if his attitude and emotions are evolving … well, if he didn’t steal it, then where did he get it? Philip Barantini’s one-take movie Boiling Point with Stephen Graham skirted around the tempestuous-chef stereotypes more adroitly than this, and TV’s The Bear was funnier. A disappointment.