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9 months ago
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“It’s about a whole bunch of things,” Mexican filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios says when quizzed on the subject of his latest feature, La Cocina, debuting this evening at the Berlin Film Festival. “In equal parts, it explores the topic of work, the American dream, the failure of the American dream, and abortion rights. That’s a really tough question as a director.”
Ruizpalacios has a point. Starring Rooney Mara and shot in a crisp digital black-and-white, La Cocina is hard to define. Running just short of two-and-a-half hours, the pic is a complex and formally ambitious tale, perhaps best described as a tragicomedy, set in a deathly busy New York City restaurant called The Grill.
The film opens during the lunch rush at The Grill, where, to the fury of the restaurant management, money has gone missing from the till. As a result, all the undocumented cooks are now subject to a rouge investigation and Pedro (Raúl Briones) is the prime suspect. Pedro is a dreamer and one of the kitchen’s largest characters. He’s also in love with Julia (Mara), an American waitress who refuses to commit to their relationship. But when Rashid, The Grill´s owner, promises to help Pedro with his immigration papers, he sees a future for himself with Julia in the U.S. But when an unexpected revelation about Julia is revealed, Pedro spirals, causing an explosion in the kitchen.
Ruizpalacios, best known for his 2014 debut Gueros, says La Cocina was inspired by his time working at a restaurant he describes as a “horrible tourist trap” called the Rainforest Cafe during his time as a student in London.
“In those types of places, you meet all kinds of people from all corners of the world that you would never really meet outside work,” Ruizpalacios says of his interest in the catering business. “Kitchens become a microcosm of how the world works. A caste system develops. And what attracts me to that subject matter is how one survives a place like that. And the only way is through friendship and camaraderie.”
La Cocina marks Mara’s first feature acting credit since 2022’s Oscar-nominated Women Talking. The pic is also one of only three movies she’s completed since 2021, following a prolific spell that saw her in 10 movies between 2015 and 2017.
“I loved Gueros, and Alonso sent me the script and this sort of mood board and a letter,” Mara recalls. “I get sent things like that a lot, and most of them are bad. You can usually tell they’re a template, and you’re like the third person to receive it. But Alonso’s was so personal and poetic. I really wanted to work with him.”
Ruizpalacios tells us he was equally passionate about collaborating with Mara and first noticed her unique screen presence during a memorable trip to the cinema in 2011, where he caught David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Mara stars alongside Daniel Craig, Stellan Skarsgård, and Robin Wright in the thriller.
“I started writing, and I began picturing her partly because of the fierceness in that film,” Ruizpalacios says. “And then I saw Carol. She was just so good at the subtext in that film. She was so frail and could communicate so much with very few words. She’s a lady of few words. But she’s really intense, and I needed that for this character.”
La Cocina was largely shot on a studio set in Mexico, where Mara said the production built its “incredibly realistic back of house kitchen.”
“I had shot a few days in Mexico before on a Terrence Malick thing, but I had never really made a film there before,” Mara says. “I don’t speak Spanish very well, but I can understand a lot of it. But it was just the best collection of people ever. It’s great to be in a different country working.”
The experience of a shoot, Mara continues, is what she thinks about most when deciding which projects to take on.
“Pretty early on, I had some very negative experiences. After working with David Fincher, I realized the director is everything. That’s who I follow. That’s my North Star,” she says.
“It’s all about whether the experience will be good. It’s such a crapshoot, even with the best directors, if something is going to be good and resonate with people. So I don’t think about that. To me, it’s about the experience because that’s what I’ll have to take with me. It’s my time and my life.”
La Cocina is Ruizpalacios’s fourth feature and, curiously, his fourth time opening a film at Berlin. The film screens in competition tonight at Berlin. Hanway is handling sales.
“I fought to open in Berlin,” Ruizpalacios says of his decision to bring the film to the German capital. “Unlike Cannes or Venice, the screenings in Berlin are sold to general audiences. So it has a very different feel.”
Despite his international festival pedigree and Mara aboard, Ruizpalacios says he still struggled to piece financing together for the pic.
“I had so many f***ing Hollywood meetings. Every single studio, every platform, and they said, ‘We love it, but it’s just a bit too risky,’” Ruizpalacios explains.
The prospect of shooting in black and white, he recalls, “really scared a lot of people,” along with the challenging political subject matter.
“But that’s the film,” he exclaims. “So we didn’t budge, and luckily, I have wonderful producers here in Mexico that have my back. And then, finally, Fifth Season came along, and they said, we believe in this movie.”
While Mara has been infrequent onscreen of late, she was set to have a relatively buzzy 2024, starring opposite her partner Joaquin Phoenix in Oscar-nominated Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski’s next feature, The Island. However, we first reported last May that the pic was shut down at the eleventh hour due to the impending SAG strike. Very little has been heard about the project since.
“Me, Joaquin, and Pawel still have hope that we will make it,” Mara says of the film. “We just don’t know when that will be. It doesn’t look like that will happen this year. But we’re all committed to the project.”
There have also been questions about the Audrey Hepburn biopic Mara had set up to produce and star in at Apple since Call Me By Your Name filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, who had been attached to direct, revealed in an audience Q&A in London that he was no longer working on the project.
“The project is not completely dead,” Mara says of the Hepburn biopic. “Luca is no longer going to be directing it, but the project is still very much alive.
She adds: “I can’t say more than that right now.”
La Cocina screens this evening at the Berlinale Palast in the German capital.
The Berlin Film Festival runs February 15-25.
