‘La Cocina’ Review: Rooney Mara In Wild Mexican Restaurant Kitchen-Set Drama That Makes ‘The Bear’ Look Like ‘Bambi’ – Berlin Film Festival
16.02.2024 - 21:57
/ deadline.com
Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios has had a winning record coming to the Berlin Film Festival since 2013, when his film Gueros took the Best First Feature prize. Five years later he was back with his second, the sensational museum-heist film Museo, and deservedly won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay. His third, A Cop Movie, which plays with the traditional docu form by using actors, won Best Documentary at Mexico’s Golden Ariel Awards.
Ruizpalacios belongs in the same league as iconic current Mexican directors Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón and particularly Alejandro González Iñárritu, whose cinematic style seems closest to what Ruizpalacios has been doing. His latest trip to Berlin, La Cocina, reinforces the thrilling talent of this singular filmmaker who for the first time has shot a film using both Spanish and English. It features American star Rooney Mara as well as a stunning, uninhibited, shoot-for-the-stars turn from Raul Briones, who worked with Ruizpalacios in A Cop Movie and took the Ariel for Supporting Actor. Here, he goes for broke.
Ruizpalacios based his screenplay rather loosely on Arnold Wesker’s 1957 play and 1961 British movie The Kitchen, both of which focused on the employees of a restaurant as they go about a typical morning on the job. He maintains the setting and the idea but infuses more of his own background of working in a London restaurant (a time where he first saw the play) and merging the American Dream of immigrants seeking a better life finding work in NYC’s tourist-trap eatery The Grill because they don’t need papers and can get good tips. But as far as food is concerned, this is no Babette’s Feast or The Taste of Things. The grub served up looks bad, and it clearly is, and
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