Film review

  • La Cocina

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alonso Ruizpalacios (2024)

    The Mexican writer-director Alonso Ruizpalacios uses lines from Henry David Thoreau as an epigraph to his film – ‘Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives / This world is a place of business / What an infinite bustle …’  Much of what follows in La Cocina comprises high-speed, high-volume action in the kitchen of a Times Square eatery – an upmarket tourist trap called The Grill.  This drama’s inspiration is Arnold Wesker’s 1957 stage play The Kitchen (first adapted for the screen in a 1961 British film directed by James Hill, best known for Born Free (1965)).  Ruizpalacios’s screenplay retains important elements of the Wesker original, which takes place in a London restaurant whose workforce includes Brits and immigrants from continental Europe, and where nearly all the kitchen staff are male, the waiting staff female.  In La Cocina, set in the present day, there’s a similar gendered division of labour, with just a few women in menial kitchen roles, and The Grill’s personnel is certainly international.  Many of the predominantly Latin American and Arab kitchen staff have an important thing in common, though:  they’re illegal immigrants.  Rashid (Odod Fehr), their Arab-American boss, talks plenty about legalising their immigration status, without making it happen.

    In short introductory sequences, Ruizpalacios follows Estela (Anna Diaz), a young Mexican, from her arrival in the US to her entry to the restaurant, by which point it’s clear that she speaks only two words of English – ‘The Grill’.  She nonetheless gets a job there, as one of the kitchen skivvies, and starts immediately:  La Cocina‘s timeframe is Estela’s first working day.  She knew where to head thanks to her cousin Pedro (Raúl Briones), who’s been working as one of The Grill’s cooks for the past couple of years.  The narrative’s main focus soon switches to Pedro and his relationship with Julia (Rooney Mara), one of the waitresses, who is pregnant with Pedro’s child.  She’s not keen to have the baby though Pedro wants her to.  The film’s key plotline is an investigation by HR manager Luis (Edoardo Olmos) into the theft of $823, reported by Mark (James Waterston), the restaurant cashier.  It emerges that this is exactly the sum Julia needs for an abortion.

    Cinematographer Juan Pablo Ramírez and editor Yibran Asuad ensure that preparations for lunch service at The Grill, hit by repeated crises, are visually dynamic, to say the least.  The frenetic kitchen activity is familiar from Philip Barantini’s Boiling Point (2021), its 2023 TV spin-off series (which I gave up on after one episode) and perhaps also The Bear (which I’ve not seen).  The visual style of the original Boiling Point was strongly aligned with the hectic, desperate state of mind of the protagonist.  Raúl Briones’s Pedro is certainly volatile – a young man described by colleagues as ‘a fun guy’, ‘a bastard’, ‘a time bomb’, and so on – but La Cocina doesn’t fuse his personality and the kitchen tempo quite as Boiling Point did.  Fair enough, to the extent that The Grill’s a big place with a huge staff:  Pedro can’t dictate its rhythms as Stephen Graham’s Andy did the cramped restaurant prep area in Boiling Point.  Yet the turmoil in La Cocina starts to seem as much imposed on the situation as integral to it.  This is because of Ruizpalacios’s occasional changes of pace, striking as these always are.  La Cocina often feels choreographed – and one of the most effective shifts in tempo comes in a short sequence that’s almost explicitly choreographed:  just before the restaurant opens to customers, the waitresses move around the dining area in time to background music playing there.  Also effective is a scene in a freezer room, where Pedro and Julia have sex:  the scene is shot in a blue light – one of only two colour sequences in this black-and-white film.  The changing of tempo seems more artificial, though, when action gives way to static talk.

    This is presumably a legacy of the Wesker play and it’s interesting to see from Wikipedia that the 1961 film of The Kitchen has been criticised (by The Radio Times Guide to Films) for ‘long, philosophical conversations [that] do not adapt well to the screen’.  The extraordinary speed of the kitchen sequences in La Cocina makes such chunks of dialogue – or, in the most conspicuous instance, monologue – awkwardly salient interruptions to the main narrative.  When African-American pastry chef Nonzo (Motell Foster) tells Pedro and others the mysterious story of a disabled immigrant saved from deportation by the intervention of an alien green light, his audience is silent and spellbound throughout.  This scene takes place in the street outside The Grill, during an afternoon break.  Before the start of dinner service, there are also sequences in Central Park, where Pedro heads to meet Julia, as they’d agreed, but she doesn’t show; and at the abortion clinic that she visits instead of meeting Pedro.  These temporary changes of scene are a relief from the kitchen mania yet they’re also, as a result, somehow anti-climactic; when Ruizpalacios switches to these other locations, the narrative is certainly less distinctive.

    Perhaps another inheritance from Wesker but the resolution of the missing restaurant takings is unsatisfying.  The theft turns out not to be a theft at all:  cashier Mark finds the money underneath his desk, in another till bag.  It’s hard to accept he didn’t spot it earlier, when supposedly searching high and low for the cash.  The explanation for this – and for the amount of money being identical, to the dollar, to Julia’s abortion costs – is probably that the alleged theft and its aftermath are essentially symbolic, a means of illustrating La Cocina‘s racial themes:  it’s immigrant Pedro rather than US native Julia who’s suspected of the theft.  (I didn’t understand either how come Pedro, as it transpires, gave Julia the money from his own savings if he didn’t want her to get the abortion.)  The film’s excessive length (139 minutes) is a bit of a problem, too.  I saw it at a midday-ish show in Curzon Soho’s largest screen, which drew attention to how few other people were there – barely double figures, and two of them left before halfway.  I never thought of joining the exodus but I had some sympathy:  La Cocina‘s relentless quality makes it seem repetitive.

    There’s plenty to admire, though.  Raúl Briones’ powerfully varied portrait of Pedro is admirable.  Rooney Mara, a much better-known performer (outside Mexico at least) than anyone else in the cast, fits in remarkably easily.  Ruizpalacios makes the main couple’s affair representative of the central immigrant theme and convincingly individual.  A character who emerges only in the closing stages – Julia’s ten-year-old daughter (Leo James Davis), whom she raised alone and whose existence comes as news to Pedro – explains in part why Julia doesn’t want a second child.  In any case, she feels less for Pedro than he does for her – never mind the scepticism of his co-workers:  as Luis explains, when a Hispanic immigrant tells a US citizen ‘Eres el amor de mi vida’ (‘You’re the love of my life’), they probably mean ‘visa’ rather than ‘vida’.  (The film’s dialogue alternates rapidly between English and Spanish.)  Ruizpalacios does well echoing details from earlier in the story for subsequent, more dramatic effect.  The live lobsters in the restaurant tank that testify to The Grill’s high-end menu anticipate a vagrant’s visit to the kitchens later in the day, begging for food:  Pedro, to the fury of his immediate boss (Lee Sellars), serves lobster to the vagrant.  Nonzo’s long story mentions two instances of the green light; when asked about the second of these, he says he doesn’t know what happened.  The film’s closing scene – after Pedro has gone crazy, trashing equipment and bringing kitchen and restaurant to a shocked standstill – provides La Cocina‘s second moment of colour:  a tiny green light, still blinking on and off on a receipts machine that Pedro wrecked, gradually suffuses him and his young cousin.  Estela’s face wears an enigmatic, Mona Lisa-ish smile.

    Pedro’s loss of control is precipitated by a waitress – like Estela on her first day at The Grill, unlike most of the waitresses not a white American:  Samira (Soundos Mosbah), working flat out during dinner service, commits the cardinal sin of taking a plate of food from Pedro rather than waiting for him to pass it out to her.  In doing so, she invades his territory; the spectacular mayhem Pedro causes in the kitchen then spills over into the restaurant, where he heads next.  The film’s climax, in other words, crystallises its immigration theme (that concluding green light is limelight).  Surveying the wreckage of the kitchen and his employees’ faces, Rashid angrily asks what more they want than paid work and food – though he knows the answer:  it’s what he keeps promising them.  La Cocina premiered at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival – some seven months before Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist was unveiled at Venice.   Ruizpalacios’s film contains an odd anticipation of one of Corbet’s most attention-getting images.  During Nonzo’s telling of his lengthy tale, there are paired shots of the Statue of Liberty and of a restaurant cleaner’s upside-down reflection in water.

    Plenty of critics’ reviews on Rotten Tomatoes see the film as a straightforward indictment of American capitalism – of how it ‘dehumanises and exploits immigrant workers’ (Tom Dawson, Radio Times).  It goes without saying that Armond White is different but it’s important to discuss him (again!) because, far from excoriating La Cocina as liberal propaganda, White hailed it as ‘the film of the year … an inspiration … a dazzling day-in-the-life exploration of the immigrant crisis that globalists have unleashed on the West’.  His review is dated 30 October 2024 – the week before last year’s US presidential election:  some of White’s  remarks – ‘the idea of ethnic diversity not only defines [New York City’s] history but now has become a political weapon created by a government-sponsored invasion’ – might seem to have been overtaken by events.  But, as noted a few weeks ago (see The Substance), Trump’s return to power hasn’t cheered up Armond White:  he’s still using films made by directors who are surely not his political soulmates as sticks to beat Hollywood with.  The latest is Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia with which, according to White, it’s essential for the new Disney Snow White to be compared (even though most US reviewers, whatever their politics, seem agreed that the Disney movie is a dud)!

    Unless a European film-maker decides to address head-on issues central to US culture wars – Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez is a case in point – White is much less bothered about their political outlook.  He can, for example, acknowledge ‘a socialist tendency’ in Mike Leigh’s cinema while warmly praising Hard Truths.  This is a weird kind of ‘America First’ thinking:  Mike Leigh and Alain Guiraudie are an ocean away, and there’s no risk of their films being dangerously influential in the US.  White’s attitude is expressed in a particularly curious way in his review of Alonso Ruizpalacios’s film.  At times, he wilfully misinterprets things in La Cocina.  Pedro says more than once, ‘You keep calling it America but America is not a country’.  White contrives to link this remark to what he calls the ‘Millennial Babel’ of bad language heard in The Grill’s kitchen, as if Pedro were condemning multiculturalism:  it seems much more likely that Pedro means to say that America (as distinct from the USA) is not a country but a continent.   At other times, White is niggled by Ruizpalacios’s liberalism – and, as a Mexican, he’s a liberal too close to home for comfort.  Whenever this happens, White invokes Arnold Wesker, left-leaning throughout his life but non-American and also now dead, as the spirit of all that’s best in this new version of The Kitchen, concluding that ‘The genius of Wesker’s play rescues the liberalism of La Cocina’.  Armond White is so blinkered by political prejudice that his perspective on contemporary cinema has now become an inevitable distorting lens.

    8 April 2025

  • A Hole in the Head

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Frank Capra (1959)

    In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when competition for the Best Original Song Oscar was stiffer than it is now, Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn wrote three of the winning songs.  They all became part of Frank Sinatra’s repertoire and outlasted the now largely forgotten films in which they first featured.  Bobby Darin sang ‘Call Me Irresponsible’ in Papa’s Delicate Condition (1963); Sinatra performed the numbers, as well as starring, in both other films – ‘All the Way’ in The Joker is Wild (1957) and ‘High Hopes’ in A Hole in the Head.  With altered lyrics but still sung by Sinatra, ‘High Hopes’ became all the more famous the following year as John F Kennedy’s presidential campaign song.  A Hole in the Head is showing at BFI this month because of its obscurity rather than its celebrated song.  The film is part of ‘The Old Man is Still Alive’, a selection of the last or late movies of front-rank directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age:  it’s implicit in the selection that these movies are less well known than most of their directors’ work.  Frank Capra made A Pocketful of Miracles (1961) subsequently; A Hole in the Head has a slot in ‘The Old Man is Still Here’ presumably because it marked a prolific film-maker’s return to Hollywood after an absence of eight years.  There seems no other good reason for its inclusion:  this is definitely not a neglected masterpiece.

    Adapted by Arnold Schulman from his 1957 Broadway stage play of the same name, A Hole in the Head is a heartwarming comedy-drama – that’s the idea anyway.  Years ago, Tony Manetta (Sinatra) emigrated to Florida from the Bronx with two pals, all three of them looking to make their fortune in Miami.  One of them succeeded – Jerry Marks (Keenan Wynn) is now a super-rich promoter – but Mendy Yales (George DeWitt) is a cab driver and Tony, though he still has big ideas, has bigger debts.  He manages the Garden of Eden hotel but owes the landlord five months’ rent – $5,300 – and has just forty-eight hours to find it if he’s to avoid eviction.  As usual when he’s on his uppers, Tony contacts his elder brother in New York.  Mario Manetta (Edward G Robinson) runs a clothing business there, with his wife Sophie (Thelma Ritter).  He’s Tony’s polar opposite – a hard-working, comfortably off, penny-pinching sourpuss.  Mario says no to this latest plea for cash until Tony fibs that his eleven-year-old son, Alvin aka Ally (Eddie Hodges), is sick.  Mario and Sophie immediately get on a plane to Florida, only to find that Ally is the picture of health.  Mario does eventually agree to loan his brother funds but on two conditions – that Ally comes back to New York to live with his more reliable relatives and that Tony, a widower, marries a wealthy woman.  Sophie even has a candidate to fit the bill – an acquaintance called Eloise Rogers (Eleanor Parker), also widowed, who has recently moved to Miami …

    Set pieces follow, meant to be amusing and/or touching, actually dispiriting because they’re so predictable.  Mario wants to seal the deal with Eloise without delay:  she meets him at Tony’s hotel, is soon on the receiving end of a tactless interrogation about her late husband’s finances and makes a swift exit.  Even so, Eloise takes to Tony and to Ally, and they to her:  it’s soon revealed she lost both her husband and her young son in an accident, that she’s lonely – tired of buying a single lamb chop for dinner – and needs to be needed again.  Tony contrives to see Jerry Marks, to pitch his dream of buying land in Florida as the site for a second Disneyland.  (Tony’s supposedly cockamamie idea wouldn’t look so cockamamie, of course, by 1971, when Walt Disney World opened near Orlando, FL.)   Tony goes greyhound racing with his old pal and one of Jerry’s concubines (Joi Lansing).  Anxious to convince Jerry he’s a man of means, he bets the whole $500 he just got in exchange for his Cadillac.  The dog wins.  He then lets his winnings ride on the next race on – wait for it – Lucky Ally!  The dog loses.  Rancid plutocrat Jerry shows his true colours by saying what he really thinks of the Disneyland scheme.  Tony returns to the Garden of Eden, ashamed and penniless.

    His only hope of cash now is sending Ally back to New York with Mario and Sophie, though it breaks Tony’s heart to suggest that.  When Ally says he won’t go, Tony lies to the boy that he’s a millstone round his neck – that Tony needs him ‘like a hole in the head’.  Ally, who adores his father and calls him ‘champ’, says he’ll never speak again to Tony again.  It all comes right in the end, which arrives very suddenly.  Tony spends the night pacing up and down outside the hotel.  Next morning, Mario, Sophie and Ally set off for the airport but Ally jumps out of the car, runs to find his father on the beach and hugs him tight.  Sophie and Mario watch the happy reunion.  ‘The poor things,’ says Sophie, ‘they’re so happy and so poor’.  Mario corrects his wife – Tony and Ally are ‘broke but not poor:  we’re poor’.  To confirm his lightning conversion to what-really-matters, Mario tells Sophie they’re going to stay on in Florida for a holiday.  Eloise turns up to tell Tony and Ally she has three lamb chops at home.

    This film was made when Hollywood casting directors subscribed to the infant-phenomenon school of child acting, with a penchant for well-fed, freckled faces, at least where boys were concerned.  Whether or not Eddie Hodges, as an actor, was more than that suggests, is beside the point:  Frank Capra expects Hodges simply to work the gears.  He’s thoroughly competent – ten-out-of-ten for timing and pointing his lines, for turning emotions on and off – but almost entirely mechanical (see below for a welcome instance of where he’s not).  Edward G Robinson and Thelma Ritter aren’t the ideal choices for their ropy roles though Robinson did make me laugh when Mario explains why on visits to Miami he’s never gone on the beach or in the sea (‘You sit there, you get hot.  You go in the water, you get cold.  You get out, you get hot again …’)  Ritter, as always, is expert and likeable but her core of rueful sanity seems at odds with a lot of Sophie’s lines.  Keenan Wynn delivers a sharp, sour turn as egomaniac Jerry.  Eleanor Parker is better here than she was playing opposite Sinatra in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) but well-bred Eloise, at this distance in time, comes over as Parker’s trying out for the Baroness in The Sound of Music (1965), with the big difference that on this occasion her character ends up on the winning side.

    That careless ending brings all the decent people together, emotionally and literally.  Conspicuously absent from the beach gathering is a character not so far mentioned.  Introducing himself in voiceover at the start, Tony explains:

    ‘That’s my hotel right there, The Garden of Eden.  But like good old Adam, my weakness is Eves.  My current Eve is a lulu.  She woulda made the serpent eat the apple.’

    The lulu is Shirl (Carolyn Jones), who’s on screen a lot during the film’s first hour.  She’s usually quite skimpily dressed and often accompanied on the soundtrack by a trumpet wah-wah to underline how sexy she is.  Though happy to display Shirl for a while, Frank Capra makes clear this kind of girl is unsuitable for high-grade family entertainment in the longer term.  At one point, Tony impulsively suggests that he and Shirl head off together to Cuba; she’s thrilled by the idea; by the time she reports to the Garden of Eden all ready to go, Tony has met Eloise and is nowhere to be seen.  Shirl exits the film, leaving only an abusive message to Tony, scrawled in lipstick on a hotel-room mirror.  You feel offended for the character and the actress playing her:  Carolyn Jones, truly eccentric, shows Shirl a sympathy that Capra and Arnold Schulman withhold.

    It was a mostly middle-aged-to-elderly audience in NFT3 for A Hole in the Head.  A fair few of us probably sat down hoping to enjoy a nice, old-fashioned picture, forgetting that old-fashioned doesn’t always seem too nice nowadays.  Tony pretends to reject Ally so energetically that he slaps the child’s face, a moment that prompted audible alarm in NFT3.  I must admit I nearly sniggered at this point – not at the slap itself but at Capra’s immediate, clumsy cut to Eloise’s shocked yet ladylike reaction to it.  In any case, I found the disposal of Shirl more offensive because in getting rid of her, the film, unlike Tony when he hits his son, isn’t putting on an act.  Despite Capra’s track record, his staging of some of the broader comedy elements – Mario and Sophie’s infantile grown-up son Julius (James Komack) in New York, a dipso hotel guest (Connie Sawyer) – is strenuous.  He does better with a running gag involving Edward G Robinson and an uncooperative rocking chair, a variation on Edward Arnold’s fine double act with a rock-hard chair seat in Capra’s You Can’t Take It with You (1938).  In the opening credits, the title and the names of Capra and the main actors move across the screen as an aerial advertisement, attached to a Goodyear blimp – an awkward assertion of the film’s CinemaScope credentials.  In the closing scene, all those who matter in the story undergo a synchronised change of heart.  There are gruesome things in A Hole in the Head from start to finish.

    But there’s also Frank Sinatra.  He could never be Hamlet or Napoleon or do much in the way of accents.  He was usually an underdog Italian-American – still unmistakably that (to Frank Loesser’s fury) when he was Jewish underdog Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls (1955).  The Jewish characters in Arnold Schulman’s stage play were Italianised for the screen A Hole in the Head, presumably for the leading man’s benefit, though perhaps for Frank Capra’s, too.  Yet within his narrow range Sinatra was unbeatable, in drama or comedy.  Even here, his combination of wit, charisma and ease on camera alchemises the phony routines he’s put through.  This isn’t entirely enjoyable – you’re too aware of the sentimental machinery for it to be that – but it is admirable, sometimes amazing.  Van Heusen and Cahn wrote two songs for the film:  the first, which Sinatra sings over those opening titles, is an undistinguished ballad (‘All My Tomorrows’) but ‘High Hopes’ is worth waiting for.  It’s actually a duet between Tony and Ally, who begs his father to do ‘the ant song’.  The way that Sinatra blends conversation and melody in what follows is miraculously natural, and Eddie Hodges is at his best during the song.  You can tell he’s genuinely having fun doing it.  In the second verse, he’s a beat slow coming in with his line and laughs at his mistake.  Thank goodness Capra kept this in:  it’s the infant phenomenon’s most human, likeable moment.

    Few directors make their best films when they’re senior citizens.  That gives BFI’s ‘Old Man’ season a somewhat dismal edge even though I won’t be able to resist the swan songs of two of my favourite directors:  it’s not as if William Wyler’s The Liberation of L B Jones and George Stevens’ The Only Game in Town (both 1970) regularly crop up on TV.  And I won’t easily forget this screening, if only because of what I didn’t see as a result of being at BFI.  This was the first time since the year after A Hole in the Head‘s release that I didn’t watch the Grand National live on television.  Despite the fact that, late in life, I’ve really gone off jumps racing, breaking this sixty-plus-years sequence felt like a dereliction of duty.  As the Aintree off time approached, I even wondered about going to the NFT3 loo to watch the race on my phone.  I did well to stay put – if I hadn’t, I’d have missed ‘High Hopes’ – but doing so also made my guilty conscience worse.  Much of the time when the National was being run was occupied by a scene in the film that takes place in Tony Manetta’s office at the hotel, with Tony standing in front of a picture on the office wall.  It’s a portrait of a horse.  Juxtaposing Frank Sinatra and a horse’s head should really have brought The Godfather to mind.  Instead, that horse on the wall seemed to be looking reproachfully at me.

    5 April 2025

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