This plot might work in an hour of TV – unfortunately, this is a movie
LA COCINA ★★
(MA) 139 minutes
If there were a prize for Most Obtrusive Cinematography, Alonso Ruizpalacios' La Cocina would be in the running. The main setting is the basement kitchen of The Grill, an imagined restaurant close to Times Square that operates on the scale of a small factory (filming was mostly in a studio in Mexico City).
The camera tracks laterally along the overhead shelves, and the film's whole midsection is occupied by a single chaotic but carefully choreographed long take in which all hell breaks loose during the lunchtime rush.
Elsewhere, dialogue scenes are filmed in heavy alternating close-ups, or the actors are pushed to the edges of the frame, with shots edited so their eyes don't appear to meet.
Most of this is in black and white, with the old-school Academy screen ratio boosting the feeling of claustrophobia – though a couple of scenes make use of colour, and the screen expands from time to time, as if Ruizpalacios feared we might be getting bored.
Very loosely based on Arnold Wesker's 1957 play The Kitchen, the film is an ensemble piece that follows a large number of employees, the majority of them undocumented immigrants from Latin America, over a single day spent toiling in The Grill's depths.
The central plotline involves Pedro (Raúl Briones Carmona), a Mexican cook near the end of his tether, and his waitress girlfriend Julia (a typically tense and whispery Rooney Mara).
She's pregnant, he wants the baby and she doesn't, and there's an issue about getting money for an abortion – all of which might be just about enough to sustain an hour-long episode of conventional TV, with other subplots woven in.
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