La Cocina 2024 Full Movie Watch Streaming
Our Love Written by Al Hazan Directed by the Starr Sisters
Synopsis
In the heart of a bustling Times Square kitchen, dreams and despair collide as each team chases the elusive American dream. “La Cocina” (2024), a bold and unconventional film by Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios, immediately reminded me of Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times.” Both films feature a memorable scene that visually and symbolically represents everything that is wrong with the dehumanization of labor. Taken together, both films present a blatant and fearless critique of the disgusting aspects of the capitalist system, of course in different centuries and at different stages. “La Cocina” combines this theme with the theme of illegal immigration in America today. American immigration films have a tradition, one could say that they represent a separate genre.
In the center of Manhattan, somewhere near Times Square
What is special about “Ruizpalacios” is that the point of view is that of immigrants. The director, most of the producers, the technical crew, the actors and the heroes of the film are mostly non-American. The director also wrote the script, which is adapted to the reality of America and today to the play by the English playwright Arnold Arnold Wesker (which also became the screenplay). The story takes place in a restaurant called “The Grill”. However, we never went in through the front door.
Pedro has an affair with a waitress named Julia, who is pregnant
From the first scene we are directed to the back entrance, and we see the restaurant itself with local customers or tourists only twice in the film. The rest of the story takes place in the kitchen, where dozens of dishes are prepared at a frantic pace for hundreds of customers, or in side streets or courtyards, where the huge garbage bags permanently generated by the scrapyard are stored. An immigrant (probably illegal) Estela, who does not speak a word of English, is hired to work in the kitchen alongside Pedro, who has been there for several years, also an illegal immigrant. The woman wants to terminate the pregnancy, the man – who may love her or perhaps just wants to resolve his legal situation somehow – would like her to keep the baby. When $832 goes missing from one of the ATMs, the entire team, made up of mostly immigrants, comes under suspicion.
“La Cocina” is not an easy film to watch
The temperature rises in the hell that is the restaurant’s kitchen. It is quite long and there are moments when the story drags and the dialogues suffer from excessive rhetoric and repetitions that add nothing. Fortunately, there are many other great scenes, inspired directorial decisions and something cinematically interesting happening on screen all the time. Perhaps fearing theatricality, director Alonso Ruizpalacios seems to constantly remind us that we are watching a production of film art. The film uses black and white, with rare color removals at key moments and at the end – a procedure, if not invented, then made famous by Steven Spielberg in “Schindler’s List”).
We are not in a temple of gastronomy, but in a very expensive junk food factory
The central scene of the film, which lasts about 15-20 minutes, is shot in a long sequence and manages to convey the hellish dynamics of the restaurant kitchen. The combination of the neorealism of the attitude and the diversity of the cinematic medium works very well. Unlike many other films whose stories take place in the kitchen, in 'La Cocina' the food preparation is not (with one exception) delicious, and the screenwriter and director did not care. The atmosphere of confusion transmitted to the audience is what the film’s heroes feel as immigrants facing American reality, hellish working conditions, language and mental barriers.