DRAMA; 2hr 19min (English and Spanish with subtitles)
STARRING: Raúl Briones Carmona, Rooney Mara
No filter: Carmona and Mara
Shot in a black-and-white, stripped of glitz or fluff, writer-director Alonso Ruizpalacios’s hyper-drama is set in a subterranean New York City restaurant kitchen that might as well be Hell. The Grill in Times Square is a shiny tourist lure, cagily staffed with illegal immigrants by its threatening owner (Oded Fehr as Rashid). His workhorses are unable to advocate for themselves, either because, like Hispanic kitchen newbie Estela (Anna Díaz), they don’t speak English, or because, like Estela’s family friend, Mexican line cook Pedro (Carmona), they’re working visa-deprived.
Undeterred by his shaky status, Pedro is a passionate dreamer, head-over-heels with waitress Julia (Mara), who, like most of the front-of-house staff, is harried, tough-talking and white. She’s also pregnant with Pedro’s baby, whom he dreams of raising with her on an idyllic beach in Mexico where no blinkered judgment can touch them. This pretty delusion is a far cry from the actual pregnancy termination that Julia is about to undergo, for which Pedro will be unjustly suspected of lifting $823 from one of Rashid’s precious cash registers.
Foodie viewers might want to hold their phones: The Grill’s kitchen is a sweatshop with the insane pressure that slave labour entails, its food a commodity prepped and plated at self-sabotaging speed. The lunchtime service, around which assorted dramas revolve, is a frenzied blur that degenerates into a literal meltdown when a soda machine malfunctions, flooding the kitchen floor.
Based on Arnold Wesker’s 1957 play The Kitchen (previously movie-adapted in 1961), Ruizpalacios’s life in the day spares no-one in its vertiginous descent, least of all those who most deserve a break. And when the passing of time is a weight you can’t shake, the toll can be cataclysmic. That Pedro has more than earned his catharsis is no consolation for the injuries it inflicts.
