Berlinale Dispatch: “Matt and Mara,” “Janet Planet,” “La Cocina”

For this batch of capsule reviews from the 74th Berlinale, I’m covering two relationship comedies (Kazik Radwanski’s Matt and Mara and Annie Baker’s Janet Planet) and Alonso Ruizpalacios’ epic about the American dream as contained within a busy Manhattan kitchen, La Cocina. Read my reviews of those films below.

LA COCINA

The American dream is just one overpriced and undercooked burger away at The Grill, a restaurant in a heavily-trafficked tourist area of Manhattan. Writer and director Alonso Ruizpalacios’ La Cocina, loosely based on Arnold Wesker’s 1957 stage play The Kitchen, is set over the course of one day at The Grill, a behemoth of a place that’s almost a world within itself. There’s a sharp divide between the front of house, where perky waitresses deliver middling meals cranked out quickly to privileged customers, and the back of house, where undocumented cooks work out of sight and out of mind, pushing through the stress and grind on hope of someday getting their papers, a promise that the restaurant’s owner Rashid (Oded Fehr) dangles in front of them like the infinite line of meal tickets. One of those employees is the brash yet charming Pedro (Raúl Briones Carmona, who carries the film with his magnetic charisma), who between showing new chef Estela (Anna Diaz, a discovery with lots of potential), who came looking for work at The Grill on the recommendation of family back in Mexico who know Pedro, the ropes, romances American waitress Julia (Rooney Mara, as perceptive a performer as ever), who is pregnant with their child but wants an abortion. All the while, $870 has gone missing from the til, and every employee’s future is on the line as they are questioned one by one.

La Cocina’s melodramatic beats eventually begin to collapse in on themselves, particularly toward the end, and a handful of the performances (Fehr’s angry head chef, and Eduardo Olmos’ self-important manager Luis) are played too big. But while La Cocina can’t fully break free of its theatrical trappings— it’s structured around a handful of single locations, a massive ensemble cast, and divided into different parts of the day that feel like distinct acts— Ruizpalacio’s makes exquisite use of every cinematic weapon in his arsenal, from cinematographer Juan Pablo Ramirez’s rich black-and-white cinematography punctuated by tinted color interludes, to his own direction. Long tracking shots that move around the space (the narrative rarely ventures outside the confines of The Grill) and where the characters are positioned (the lines dividing front of house and back of house, Pedro and Julia’s flirtatious dance around a lobster tank decorated with its own Statue of Liberty standing right in their way) speak volumes about the caste system in place in the kitchen (a stand-in for how immigrants are treated in the United States at large), and the anti-capitalist statement inherent in the way this machine turns out food that everyone knows is bad for profit (Ruizpalacios refers to La Cocina as “anti-food porn”). There are many complexities at work in La Cocina that didn’t all land with me at first watch, but that make me excited to revisit it in the future. And you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more invigorating piece of filmmaking than the lunch rush sequence, as the camera and actors move around each other in an intricate dance that stresses the pressure and extremely high stakes of their job. At one point, the soda fountain breaks and the kitchen floor floods, the waitresses wading through waves of Cherry Coke that lick at their angles as they race to gather and deliver large plates of food to inconsiderate patrons. One of them slips, her platter of already long-overdue plates flying across the room, the shouts and tears and clanking of cutlery transforming the kitchen into a war zone as heart-palpitating as any action movie.

La Cocina had its world premiere at the 74th Berlinale on February 16. Runtime: 139 minutes.

MATT AND MARA

When we first meet Mara, Matt is tapping her on the shoulder as she’s pressing through a crowd of university students to get to the class she’s teaching. “What are you doing here?” She asks, evidently surprised, but not in an unpleasant way. Within seconds, a well-worn connection between the two title characters of director Kazik Radwanski’s off-beat relationship comedy Matt and Mara is established. But what exactly is the nature of that relationship? It’s something that neither Mara (played by Deragh Campbell, a writer stuck in a teaching job, married to a musician with a young toddler) nor Matt (Matt Johnson, a published author whose father is ill) seem to know. Conversations between the pair gradually unravel their past: they were best friends, and possibly almost-lovers, in college who haven’t seen each other in while. And as they spend more time together following Matt’s reappearance in Mara’s life, where they stand with each other, what each of them perceive of their relationship, and what each of them want from it, becomes even more uncertain.

That uncertainty is one of the pleasures of Matt and Mara, serving as an accurate, funny, and sometimes painfully relatable reflection of how our own relationships are rarely ever just one thing. That this is Radwanski’s, Campbell’s, and Johnson’s third collaboration is reflected in the ease with which they work together, with Campbell and Johnson playing off of each other in a freewheeling fashion that feels entirely natural and believable, while imbuing each of their characters with a series of endearing quirks (the relentlessness with which Mara is constantly getting her passport photo retaken, for one). But that uncertainty is also a hindrance to a film where each characters’ feelings and desires are rarely manifested as more than whispers. We never get the sense that Mara is entirely unhappy in her marriage, or that she is looking for an out, and it’s nice to see that imbalance play out between her and Matt, who seems convinced that, even a husband and a baby later, they’re still meant to be. Matt and Mara lacks tension, even in the build-up to what could be called the climax of this otherwise plot-less film (Matt drives Mara from Canada to the States for a conference when her husband has to back out), but the bigger issue is that it lacks introspection, just pleasantly coasting by until it finally ends as suddenly as it began.

Matt and Mara had its world premiere at the 74th Berlinale on February 20. Runtime: 80 minutes.

JANET PLANET

Time is slippery when you’re a kid, but especially in the summertime: that liminal space between the school year where time zips by even as the days blend into each other in one never-ending stretch. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker portrays this feeling with an acute perceptiveness in her directorial debut feature Janet Planet, shot in and around where she grew up in rural western Massachusetts.

When we first meet 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), she’s calling her mother from camp, declaring that if she doesn’t get to go home immediately, she’ll kill herself (immediately distancing Janet Planet from the typical cutesy tone of many coming-of-age movies). Lacy doesn’t believe any of the other kids at camp are interested in her, but she’ll soon be struggling with a similar lack of attention at home. Lacy’s single mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson) is an acupuncturist who moves in artsy, hippie circles, and Janet Planet is structured in three acts dictated by the three adults who drift in and out of Janet’s— and by extension, Lacy’s— life over the course of the summer. First there’s boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton), an inscrutable and semi-intimidating figure who gives Lacy one of the best days of her summer through time spent with his daughter Sequoia (Edie Moon Kearns), who is of the same age and somewhat disaffected nature as Lacy. Then there’s Regina (Sophie Okonedo), a puppeteer and member of a cult-like colony who becomes a subject of fascination for Lacy, while her initially close friendship with Janet deteriorates the more time they spend together. And then there’s the pretentious Avi (Elias Koteas), the leader of said colony.

This stacked supporting cast and the way their varied personalities ebb and flow over the course of the summer reveal a lot about Lacy and Janet both independently and as a pair; that she believes her mother has poor taste in men is something Lacy makes abundantly clear, and while the strain that puts on this mother/daughter relationship is fairly muted in this low-key film, it is still present, in no small part thanks to the wonderfully textured performances of the dependably great Nicholson and Ziegler, a wonderful discovery who has never acted before this film but deftly walks a line between possessing mature wisdom and also the quirks of being a kid. Shot on 16 mm by cinematographer Maria von Hausswolf (most recently of Godland fame, so her penchant for shooting gorgeous landscapes is no surprise), Janet Planet makes the natural surroundings as much a part of the story as the characters; with the sounds of nature (crickets chirping, the wind rustling the grass) serving as the film’s soundtrack, the sort of things that a child would note about the environment are placed center stage, warm without dipping too much into nostalgia. The production design is just as neat and detailed, decidedly set in 1991 without relying too heavily on the trademarks of the era, choosing instead to focus on unique, character-defining items like Janet’s assortment of dolls handmade from objects like salt and pepper shakers. Perhaps Janet Planet is a little too carefully composed for a film about messy people, but this shimmering tale of a girl distancing herself from her mother’s orbit— and realizing that she is just as flawed as the other adults she knows— still casts a hypnotic spell.

Janet Planet had its international premiere at the 74th Berlinale on February 16. It is slated to be released by A24 in 2024. Runtime: 110 minutes.