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The Mexican filmmaker premiered ‘La Cocina’ at the last Berlinale, capturing all eyes and critical acclaim. This adaptation of Arnold Wesker’s play that set the plot in a London West End café is now adapted to modern times with a new drama that focuses on the dehumanisation of work.
Shot in black and white and starring Raúl Briones, Anna Días and Rooney Mara, the film also screened at the Seminci and won the Audience Award at the Morelia Festival.
La Cocina’ is set in the kitchen of a famous tourist restaurant in the heart of Manhattan. In ‘The Grill’, one day money disappears from the cash register and everything points to Pedro as the main suspect, a rebellious dreamer who will trace an impossible love story with the waitress Julia.
The Mexican director portrays the extreme pressure and contemporary freneticism with which these workers live; revealing the power dynamics implicit in their work context. Situations that the director experienced personally when, while studying, he worked in a kitchen in London; a kind of reflection of his past, a tragicomedy set in a space that renders people invisible.
In this perspective, this restaurant becomes the nucleus where several metaphors of the modern world converge, such as inequalities and the search for the ‘American dream’ by the immigrants who arrive daily in the United States.
