Alonso Ruizpalacios on the Immigrant Dreams of 'La Cocina' (2024)

Alonso Ruizpalacios established himself as a keen observer of life in Mexico beginning with feature-length directorial debut, 2014’s Güeros. Shot in luminous black and white, the shaggy dramedy abounds as much in potshots at Mexican culture as it does in homages to cinema. His subsequent films are no less playful with form, including 2021’s docudrama A Cop Movie, a galvanizing portrait of police work that subverted genre conventions.

Ruizpalacios’s fourth feature, La Cocina, which premiered at the Berlinale earlier this year, isn’t set in Mexico, but many of its characters hail from the director’s country of origin, and their immigrant dreams are as much the subject here as the exploitative nature of capitalism. The film, based on Arnold Wesker’s 1957 play The Kitchen, is set almost entirety in a Times Square restaurant, and it finds Ruizpalacios tackling political issues from a personal perspective.

At the start of the film, a young immigrant woman (Anna Díaz) is hoping to secure a job at the Grill, but almost as soon as she enters the restaurant, the story shifts to focus on her relative, Pedro (Raúl Briones). The hotheaded chef is feeling the pressure of his waitress girlfriend, Julia (Rooney Mara), wanting to have an abortion, and he soon finds himself suspected of theft after $800 goes missing from the restaurant’s till. As the long day unfolds, the film’s mix of chaos and humor works to bring the dreams of its characters to vibrant, poignant life.

Back in early June, a few days after Mexico’s general elections, Ruizpalacios spoke with me about the making of La Cocina, its particular take on the immigrant experience, working in kitchens, and his own dreams of the future.

Have you ever worked in a restaurant or kitchen?

Yes, I have, which is kind of what drew me to the play. In my student days in London, when I was studying acting, I worked at the Rainforest Café, which is now extinct. It was like the Grill. I worked as a dishwasher and then a waiter. I was fascinated by all the intricacies of kitchen life. It really made an impression on me. I came across the play when I was working there.

There’s both a vastness and a claustrophobia to the film on the visual level. To what degree was that intentional?

I think the intention was to evoke in the audience the same feeling of claustrophobia and being trapped that you get inside those places. It was important to start outside the kitchen and go in through the back door in both a metaphorical and literal way. We go into the story not through the main character, but through a secondary character we don’t know is secondary until later. I always wanted to make a film where the lead doesn’t turn up until a half hour in. Those kinds of formal challenges are ideas I have. What I wanted mainly was to show the audience what it is like to go to one of those places where you lose all sense of time. The interval [in the alley] gives you a breather. The format expands once we come out into the alley and there is stillness, finally. It’s a film about contrasts—all these contrasting lives of immigrants and locals and how they negotiate their every day. I wanted it, formally, to also be a statement about contrasts. There is a wider aspect ratio then there is a tighter aspect ratio. There is a lot of movement and then big stillness. I wanted the audience to experience these contrasts.

I love that we only sit with the characters during a single day. Pedro’s phone call with his father gives you an inkling of his life, and a single line of dialogue can explain so much about a character. That feels very intentional.

That was the intention—to only get glimpses of the characters through very specific cues. During the casting and rehearsal process, we were like a theater troupe. We brought the actors to Mexico for a few weeks and improvised and built their backstories, which makes things more specific. There’s a line in the play that I cut where one character is complaining about how hard the work is, and another character says, “It’s the same in every other job. You go in, you talk to people, you think you know them, you realize you don’t know them, you leave, and you never see them again.” That’s how we build capitalism and build our working lives around this system that doesn’t allow for intimacy. That’s why I wanted the audience to get—little inklings of people’s lives. You never get to sit down and understand their whole life. Everything is about creating a subjective experience of what it’s like to be in a kitchen.

It’s also fascinating that we don’t know why Pedro pulled a knife on a co-worker. We don’t need to know why, only that it happened, and things are tense between them. Pedro’s character is both a leader and a problem. He’s nasty and yet he’s loveable. Is that how you envisioned him from the start?

Samira [played by Soundos Mosbah] says this guy is a fucking time bomb. I wanted to explore an unusual kind of immigration story. The immigrants portrayed in movies usually keep a low profile, because real-life immigrants have to—especially undocumented ones. It’s a survival thing. But I wanted someone who wasn’t content with what life has given him. He’s uneasy. He’s searching. In a different place, or different time, he could be a leader and do great things. But he has been put in this spot. He has a lot of energy and ideas. He’s a restless character. That was the starting point of La Cocina—to explore that restlessness, someone who isn’t okay with where he is in contrast to the rest of the people who can keep their noses down and carry on with the job. They send money home, which is a big part of why they do it. A lot of Mexico’s income is from those families sending money home every day.

The film is a cacophony of voices, from people discussing their dreams to the shouting of orders. How did you work at creating the rhythm of the film? It’s fast, it’s slow, and it even takes a pause for a song at one point. There’s even a moment of quiet. It becomes intense and then eases back. It feels authentic.

It comes first from the script. I tried to picture it like a musical score. It has an intro, a crescendo. Then there’s an adagio moment, and a resolution. It’s more musical than a three-act structure. When we were filming it, I played a lot of music to help the actors get into scenes or set the mood of a scene. I had a very specific playlist.

What is on your playlist?

When Julia comes in in one scene, I played a piece called “The Sinking of the Titanic,” an eerie, instrumental, avant-garde piece. I played it for Rooney and didn’t tell her anything. I played it over all the shots and said we’ll dub this later. She used it and sloped down and walked with weight. On the contrary, for the lunch rush scenes, I played very upbeat Bomba music—very hectic, very crazy music. It was shot in a very musical way, and then it was cut in a very musical way. But we took the music out, which is interesting.

This echoes the chatter in the opening scene, set in a busy, bustling Times Square, where someone recites a fantastic speech. How did that come about?

The monologue the guy delivers was a happy accident. We shot that very guerilla documentary style. We were shooting Anna [Díaz], the actress playing Estella, going into Time Square, and we bumped into this guy. I was interested in showing the different homeless people in Times Square, to show the “other face” of Times Square. We asked if we could take portraits, and some of them are in the film. And then we asked this guy if he lived there, and he said Times Square is my place, and he went into this this whole monologue. You could never write that!

What observations do you have about the immigrant experience and this kind of service work? There is a camaraderie and some rivalry. They are all part of a melting pot, but also a “you do you” mindset. The Moroccan and Dominican characters are great because you see them at their best and at their worst.

Part of the point was to give each person a different story and not to generalize. The immigrant experience is not one. In movies, it is often equalized. Everyone has a different experience. When I was writing the film, I did a research trip to New York and went into lots of different kitchens, and I interviewed people and recorded the interviews. Some of the lives and ideas came from those interviews. Samira was based on a girl I interviewed whose parents sent her to the U.S. because she was gay. They hoped that sending her to New York would cure her! She tells this laughing. It helped her come out of the closet completely and embrace her sexual identity. Every single person has a very unique story, and that’s what we tried to show.

There are lots of fantastic sequences in the film, like the long tracking shots of all the stations and the amazing flood scene that’s almost surreal. It all feels so organic, never gimmicky. How did you work to ensure that distinctiveness?

We built that kitchen and shot it on a soundstage. My production designer and I analyzed the script and broke it down and made sure we built a kitchen that was like a labyrinth. We walked through every scene before we started building. It was a very meticulous design. I knew that I wanted that central piece in the lunch rush to be a oner, so we built it so it could accommodate all the comings and goings. When we were shooting it, my DP, Juan Pablo Ramirez, asked, “What is the concept behind this?” And it was that we have to pretend that we’re doing a war documentary. The camera arrives late and reacts to loud noise. We got inspiration from war footage. We wanted to make sure it was an immersive experience.

Did you set out to approach the shooting of food in a certain way?

There are all these food-porn movies and programs, and we’ve been flooded with them lately. Cinema and food have always been closely linked, like lovers. I wanted to make an anti-food-porn film about the shitty food we eat. The place I worked at, the Rainforest Café, was that kind of food. And the places in Times Square are like that—mid-level [eateries] trying to look fancier [than they are]. It’s about quantity not quality. It’s a metaphor for late capitalism. People aren’t allowed to put their art into practice. They have to produce, produce, produce. It’s a production line. That’s what I was interested in. The only food-porn moment, which is very deliberate, is when Pedro makes a sandwich for Julia. It’s an act of love. That scene we shot in a kind of classic food-porn way. It looks sumptuous and lovely and delicious with nice lighting. But the rest of the food in the whole film had to be fast and abundant.

And doing it in black and white didn’t make it look appealing!

Exactly! Someone said when we open, at the premiere we should offer nice food. And I said, “No, that would be wrong! Our restaurant is meant to be shitty! It’s not nice food!”

There are key scenes in the dining room and in the alley that inform the characters. Pedro steps out of the kitchen onto Julia’s turf where she has control. Can you talk about this strategy to leave the kitchen?

The play was originally set in just one place, the kitchen, and that was a formal challenge I gave myself to make it a cinematic experience, and not make it feel like a play. That was part of the reason for leaving the kitchen. But like you say, I found meaning in that—there are clear territories. The restaurant is the waitresses’ turf. Cooks look out of place in the restaurant. The two times Pedro crosses that barrier he violates the rules. It was important those frontiers are very clearly limited. Because they are in restaurants. The same goes for waitresses in the kitchen. They know it’s not their territory. They’re walking on thin ice. Pedro says to Laura [played by Laura Gómez], [a waitress], that she can’t touch the food—that it’s his place.

The alley scene is one of the emotional centers of the film. Are there differences between your take on it and how it functions in the play?

The alley is the other main reason for doing this film. It’s a big moment in the play. It doesn’t take place in the alley, but it takes place in the lull between the afternoon service and the night service. The [staff] gets to rest and get to know each other and talk about their dreams. That’s something Wesker wrote in his play, and I think it’s really beautiful as a concept. Working-class people, these cooks, sitting down and talking about their dreams. It’s like something out of a novel, or something that happens in movies, but it can happen in real life. They talk about their dreams in a very off-handed way. I find that really beautiful.

The film also addresses abortion. Was there any discussion about how to handle the topic, especially given the current pace of opinions on the topic?

I don’t think the film is preaching anything. I hope it isn’t. With Roe v. Wade being overturned…the people who made La Cocina are obviously pro-choice. In the play, Julia is thinking about getting an abortion, but it’s a secondary subplot. I wanted to bring it forward. It’s important that we talk about it. The film is about agency, and recovering agency, and people fighting to make their decisions against very complex systems that try to keep them from making decisions.

When she’s answering a questionnaire—which I took from a real questionnaire they give you at clinics like Planned Parenthood—and she ticks all the boxes, that’s a statement. She’s saying that it’s her business. “I don’t have to explain why I’m doing this. I’m doing this because it’s my body and my choice.” We’re not spoon-feeding her reasons for doing it. She doesn’t want to explain. It was interesting and delicate to shoot all that. I tried to approach it with respect, and caution, and curiosity. I asked a lot of questions to women and Rooney’s input was vital in how we shot those scenes, because it was important to show her decision and that it has an emotional toll.

La Cocina is about dreams. Immigrant dreams. Food dreams. Dreams of love, and money, and a house. What’s your dream?

Jesus, that’s a very tough question, my friend. Right now, I dream my country gets steered in the right direction. We just voted two days ago and there are a lot of doubts about our government. I have hope. I would dream for a more peaceful country. Mexico needs to be pacified. It has become a very violent country both physically and emotionally. I do dream of helping somehow to pacify it. I don’t know that movies make a difference. But I dream they would. I hope they do.

I also dream that this movie gets seen. It’s a tough film. It’s black and white, half in Spanish and half in English. I hope people come to it and appreciate all the love and work that went into it. It’s a tough and very cynical market right now, so I think movies like the one we made are having a very tough time right now. I hope and I dream that people take to it.