Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.La Cocina might seem a film that has come too late. It depicts the behind-the-scenes frenzy at a large restaurant — and we are already full to satiation after Boiling Point and The Bear. But La Cocina goes much further back; it is based on Arnold Wesker’s 1957 London-set play The Kitchen. In this partly Spanish-language version by Mexican writer-director Alonso Ruizpalacios, the location is New York — and a vast, superficially classy but strictly industrial eaterie on Times Square.Raúl Briones plays Pedro, a cook, stressed-out clown and provocateur whom the short-fuse head chef (Lee Sellars) has on a three-strikes warning. Like many slaving in this culinary sweatshop, Pedro is in the US illegally, holding out for the elusive dream of a visa.While Juan Pablo Ramírez’s black-and-white camera restlessly stalks the cooking stations, in and out of the back corridors, Pedro tries to find a quiet moment with waitress Julia (Rooney Mara), who has discovered she is pregnant. There is a sharp edge of eroticism in the scenes between the lovers, not least because of the mounting tension of the day — only slightly relieved by a lunchtime interlude in which a quietly show-stopping Motell Foster recounts an enigmatic anecdote.In La Cocina, food is prepared not con amor but in an angry last-chance frenzy. Ruizpalacios, who made the brilliant Netflix fiction-doc hybrid A Cop Movie, directs with ferocious brio. The allegorical aspect is very much upfront — the restaurant manifestly a model of the US devouring its immigrant population — and La Cocina sometimes abrasively retains its theatrical roots, not least in the explosion that Briones’s performance simmers up to. But both he and Mara, who plays it spikier and more street-smart than usual, are magnetic, and the choreography of a bustling ensemble cast is quite dazzling. Unashamedly heavy on the seasoning, certainly, but a feast nonetheless.★★★★☆In UK cinemas from March 28 and on streaming platforms in the US now
