LA COCINA ****
This work is like a fist in the stomach. Filmed in black and white, almost like a documentary, it features various workers in a busy restaurant – The Grill – around Times Square. They are cooks, busboys, dishwashers, waitresses, all with different backgrounds, languages, hangups. This is the lower echelon of the ‘melting pot’ that New York is famous for, highlighting immigrants that have come for a better life and bigger dreams.
One main fellow stands out, the explosive Pedro from Mexico (the wiry Raul Briones). He’s the guy whom his younger cousin, fresh from Mexico, has come to for a job there. She gets lucky with her timing and beats out a woman who had an actual appointment but arrived just a bit too late. That’s how the cookie crumbles in a rat race like this film. From this first encounter the film grabs us by the collar and takes us through the crazy shenanigans in the back rooms and the incredibly hectic kitchen.
Trouble starts when about 800 dollars are missing from the till. Pedro may have taken it for his girlfriend Julia (beautifully played by the delicate Rooney Mara). They’re a volatile couple who seem to have different ideas about their future together. And there are other characters under tension in this concentrated microcosm of the world outside, which feels incredibly actual.
Mexican director Alonzo Ruizpalacios wraps it all together like a ticking bomb, and it will leave you breathless when it’s done. Unforgettable.
(showing at the GRÜTLI cinemas)
SINNERS ***1/2
This is one roller coaster of a film! The black director Ryan Coogler, of deep and exciting films such as “Fruitvale Station”, and the “Black Panther” and “Creed” series, takes us down to Mississippi in the 1930s. Twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by the charismatic Michael B. Jordan) have come back home from financial success in Chicago. They’re gentlemen gangsters and are bent on creating a musical joint in the middle of white supremacist country. They take their guitar-playing cousin (Miles Caton) under their wing along with another veteran blues musician, perfectly portrayed by the craggy Delroy Lindo.
Here is a powerful tale of the black experience through religion, music, black magic and even zombies that need to be wiped out. This incredible mixture of pride, passion and thrills woven together as an homage to the blues actually works, despite the zombies. But then, the 12-year collaboration between Coogler and Jordan plays its magic here, once again. Riveting.
ERNEST COLE, PHOTOGRAPHER ***
Haitian documentary director Raoul Peck, who was recently invited to this month’s Visions du Réel documentary festival in Nyon, is a fervent chronicler of black experiences, as in his exceptional “I’m Not Your Negro” about James Baldwin, from 2016.
This one recounts the life of South African photographer Ernest Cole, whose exceptional photo book on the apartheid years in his country was never allowed to be published there. Peck takes us through Cole’s barren, lonely life as an immigrant in New York, the ups and downs in his career as a photographer, and the mystery of his huge cache of his prints in a Swedish bank vault, found after his premature death. An important tribute to a sadly wasted talent.
(showing at the GRÜTLI cinemas)
LA REPARATION ** (vo French)
This is also about chefs and kitchens, but more in the melodramatic style of the veteran French director Régis Wargnier of such romantic films as “Indochine” (Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1992), “Une femme française” and “Est-Ouest”.
Unfortunately, this latest is more like a soppy telefilm than great cinema in its telling of a secret love, a father/daughter complicity and dedication to fine food, a suspicious disappearance, and then some travels to the Far East for an exotic touch. Colourful but too contrived and predictable.
Superb **** Very Good *** Good ** Mediocre * Miserable – no stars
By Neptune
Neptune Ravar Ingwersen reviews film extensively for publications in Switzerland. She views 4 to 8 films a week and her aim is to sort the wheat from the chaff for readers.
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