Luis Martínez Berlin

Berlin

Updated Friday, February 16, 2024-21:31

  • Inauguration Cillian Murphy sadly inaugurates a Berlinale that is presumed to be very sad

  • Controversy The deputies of the far-right AfD are not welcome at the Berlinale

There are few cinematography as active, addictive, attentive to everything, influential and permeable as the Mexican one, capable at the same time of dictating the rules where almost everything is decided (here, the trio formed by Cuarón-Iñárritu-Del Toro) and of rigorously inventing paths new ones (Reygadas or the Salvadoran resident in Mexico Tatiana Huezo). Let's say that in the middle, between the cinema that seeks an audience and the cinema that is sought, a figure like

Alonso Ruizpalacios would be found.

His first film, '

Güeros

', from 2014, discovered him as a fine and thorough stylist, a filmmaker with a poetic attitude and gesture (and therefore, radically political) committed not to results, but to breadth. Next, he completed the stinging and illuminated farce '

Museum

' (2018) and, especially, '

A Police Movie

' (2021), a half-documentary production, the other half even more real than reality itself. It was fiction, but with an intensity so true that it hurt.

'The Kitchen

', with an American star in the background like

Rooney Mara

and with an approach at least as radical as his best works, was destined to be, so to speak, his confirmation. With all the religious meaning that the term carries as a sacrament that it is. It is not so much about validation as far as others are concerned, but rather about affirmation in one's own faith, the faith of a filmmaker. Amen.

And this is what the very pagan Berlinale considered him to be,

which is the festival that has seen and awarded his previous works, giving him a place of honor in the desert of honors that this edition is experiencing.

Well, it is proven once again that when things don't work out, they don't work out. The excessive gesture, the total absence of control and the more than just condescending attitude towards the viewer mercilessly ruin

the interesting, provocative and very risky starting point.

The idea is to enclose in the narrow margin of the kitchen of a restaurant in the heart of New York's Times Square all the possibilities of being an immigrant in the country most eminently of immigrants. It's not revolutionary, but it is (sorry) succulent.

The film starts with the grammar of the street. So close to reality that it stains. The camera follows the aspiring cook in a place more like a tourist trap. She doesn't speak English, she has no papers, no money.

You could say that her only possession is her uncertain desire to end up possessing something.

Whatever. What she will find there is a perfect collection of identical beings, of immigrants without documents, without words, without a voice and many of them already without desires.

Thrown into the usual frenetic rhythm - and already quite tiring, by the way - of any self-respecting kitchen movie (when will chefs stop selling themselves as stress-generating machines?),

The Kitchen

crosses stories, changes points of sight, intersperses languages, interrupts the narration to offer the specific account of a dream (as is) and, in the background, deep in the background, the McGuffin-like mystery of a theft of just over 800 dollars.

Ruizpalacios wants everything, and everything very quickly.

The drama of a group of people trapped in a rubbish job close to semi-slavery coexists with noisy, eccentric and, at times, unbearable comedy. That's what it's about, doing harm. And in the same way, all forms of grammar, genres and gestures are highlighted (and also rebelled) thanks to a staging where the camera can be, literally, anywhere. Of course, the interpretations are anything but restrained. Here he shouts up the

script

.

The problem is not so much excessiveness, despite all the problems it generates with overexcitement, but rather self-indulgence.

'The Kitchen'

barely surpasses the most obvious discourse on bloody evidence such as inequality, exploitation, poverty or fear of all of the above. However,

the exhibitionist tone, the permanent feeling of discovering the world in every plane

and, as a consequence, the lack of modesty end up ruining a good part of that desire to break everything that, in truth, is always exciting.

It cannot be denied that the play was close to suicide and, as in all games in which everything is bet on a number, you either win a lot or lose almost everything. Pity. Count it as the first disappointment of the Berlinale and something else.

Although it is also true that, when faced with crashing, it is better to do it in a big way, against the sky itself.