"La Cocina" and "My Favourite Cake" Reviews, Berlinale Days 1 and 2
I finally locate the politics of the festival in a Mexican film about kitchen work life and Iranian film about a woman's forbidden desires.
As any bona fide P.I. or overly zealous freelance writer would do, I sat down to watch movies for eight hours per day after everyone, including Jury President Lupita Nyong’o, insisted on calling Berlinale a political film fest. Through my preliminary findings, the festival opened with an anti-religious institution Irish film starring Cillian Murphy, in which I experienced a bit of verbal press politics myself. The film was political to a degree, but I kept looking. The first official day I watched Cuckoo (German-American co-production starring Euphoria’s Hunter Schafer and directed by sophomore horror Tilman Singer), which was also somewhat political in how it dealt with Bavarian Alpine conservatism. Then played La Cocina, starring Rooney Mara and directed by Mexican filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios. Being sufficiently political, I reviewed this in full.
La Cocina follows a Moby-Dickesque framing: like Ishmael losing his individuality and story perspective upon joining the Pequod crew, Estela (Anna Díaz), a recent immigrant in NY looking for a restaurant without knowing English, gets a job at a Times Square multi-cultural (over-priced) eatery and becomes one of the crew rather than completing a character arc. The story then re-focuses on Pedro (Raúl Briones) and Julia (Rooney Mara), soon to be accidental parents unless Julia goes through with an abortion planned between her lunch and dinner shifts. She gets the eight-hundred USD from Pedro, but we’ve recently learned that around that much money was stolen from a till the previous evening. The main boss wants to know who stole it without the police, so suspicions run a little higher than usual during their busy rushes with the many cooks, waitresses, and managers.
More than anything one is drawn towards the ability of form to match function. Shot in 4:3 and B&W, the director (Alonso Ruizpalacios), who recalled that he always wanted to shoot this way and came up with a justification for the producers later, confines the viewer to the contradictions inherent to the kitchen world (upstairs/downstairs, front-of-house/back-of-house) in an “un-time specific” setting. Furthermore, the contrast clash between being a foreigner is similar (and sometimes even inherent) to the alienating experience of a cook’s low wages and high working hours life. In this way a kind of anti-American dream is played out as the characters enact different and oftentimes unrelated scenarios on how dreams run into the brick wall of reality. As Ruizpalacios explained, he wanted to craft a post-border crossing story; what happens after the immigrant gets in? Answer: they find late capitalism represented through the everyone-for-oneself atmosphere of a busy kitchen, where any form of comradery formed between rushes is thrown away.
The dreamy scenes are matched with an equally rigorous amount of camera moves and tricks, none of which are over-used beyond the context of the scene. Thus, a very long shot going between cooks and patrons shows a kitchen in frenetic chaos during The Rush. Cherry coke fills the kitchen floor (which is based on an irl incident when Ruizpalacios went to go see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in NY on Christmas and the staff didn’t care about a fountain of cherry coke gushing out), waitresses pick up orders faster than cooks can cook, food crash lands on the floor, yelling is the default speaking volume.
While the internal monetary investigation is playing out around the edges, Pedro and Julia’s relationship receives the majority of story-time. From what one could tell, Julia became pregnant after a fleeting moment with Pedro, maybe even at work. Julia wants an abortion, Pedro somehow gives her the amount despite being poor but also doesn’t want Julia to go through with it. He argues they should run away to Mexico where he can feel a sense of freedom again, linguistically or otherwise. But Julia also hears that Pedro maybe wants her to keep the kid as a way for himself to become legal. Though at times the kitchen feels like a culinary United Nations as each cook comes from somewhere else, Spanish is the majority (comfort) language that they can’t quite let go. (The film was shot for ten weeks in Mexico, where the kitchen was created on a soundstage and the dining area was an actual Cheesecake Factory in Mexico City, and another week in New York.)
The film asks (and mostly answers) the tough questions regarding the politics of service work and immigration. Ruizpalacios understood the job well while also creating a compelling audiovisual experience that will certainly be competitive in the main competition.
Like their fellow countryman Jafar Panahi, who was confined after receiving attention from secretly premiering No Bears at Venice in 2022 through smuggling the USB out of Iran in a cake, directors Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha were banned from going to Berlin for the premiere of My Favourite Cake (no cake familial connections as far as I can check). Instead, the two leads of the film, Lily Farhadpour and Esmail Mehrabi, made an appearance and delivered a moving message from the directors on the importance of filmmaking in providing stories to those who don’t ever get a voice and the vagrancies of censorship that stifles creativity and art. Unless entries from Ukraine or Palestine are sent in, Iranian films are always the most devastatingly and timely political of films at these festivals.
The police raided the production offices of the filmmakers, but failed to find the film that was shown here. If they had found it, they wouldn’t have liked it’s depiction of a seventy-year old widow (Farhadpour) who didn’t properly cover her hair, helped save a young lady from the morality police, and then invited a non-related man (Mehrabi) over to her place. Central to the film’s potential censorship problems is the telling of a story about a pre-Rev sensible woman without a family, and the hardships associated with that, like being horny and wanting to liquor up the taxi driving pensioner/divorcee for a fun night of drinking and cake. If only things were that easy.
Not wanting to use the über-cliché, but it’s appropriate, this is the kind of “truth to power” filmmaking that is “dangerous” in all the ways people misunderstand these concepts in the West. The filmmakers, who collaborated once before in 2020 on Ballad of a White Cow, put themselves on the line, and are now on the same high-profile shit-list as Panahi and others. All because they wanted to depict the realities of an un-sanctioned woman on screen to a sympathetic audience.
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