Rooney Mara as Julia and Raúl Briones as Pedro in “La Cocina”

Once in a while a film comes along that is so audacious and outrageous it takes your breath away.

One such was the 2014 Argentine film “Wild Tales”, a series of vignettes in one of which two male drivers fight to their deaths after cutting each other off on a mountain road. Another is a wedding in which the groom cheats on the bride before the nuptials. When she finds out she takes her revenge on the other woman, the groom, the groom’s family and the wedding guests, after which they marry.

Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios’s “La Cocina” (The Kitchen), which is competing for the main Berlinale Golden Bear gong, has that kind of DNA. Adapted from the 1957 play “The Kitchen” by British dramatist Arnold Wesker, it stars Rooney Mara as Julia, a waitress at The Grill, a Midtown Manhattan restaurant only a tourist would go to. She is pregnant by Pedro (Raúl Briones), an illegal Mexican immigrant and the most talented line chef in the kitchen.

The opening is a slow burn as Estela (Anna Diaz), another illegal Mexican immigrant, makes her way to The Grill where she’s heard there’s a job on offer and she hopes a family connection with Pedro will help her get it.

Ruizpalacio sets the scene nicely as Estela, who has no English and asks directions in Spanish, travels from the bustling avenues and side streets to the back alleys and back door of the restaurant. Refuse is piled high and she glimpses a rat big enough to slink away with an entire discarded pizza.

Ruizpalacio has a keen eye for the detail of what a stainless-steel kitchen staffed with galley slaves should look, sound and feel like. Rather than a melting pot, it is a boiling cauldron of different nationalities, feuding with each other sometimes amiably, sometimes violently. A towering white male who lords it over the steak preparation counter builds up a head of steam as other chefs speak Spanish. “Speak English”, he bellows, making menacing, sharpening motions with his knives.

The lit fuse that ignites this combustible atmosphere is the discovery by the restaurant’s accountant that some $800 has gone missing from a till. It is quickly established that $800 is roughly the amount Julia would need for an abortion. Fingers start pointing at Pedro, because he has turned up late to work that day. The anti-immigrant undercurrent that runs through the film will bring Pedro down.

Before that shattering finale, Ruizpalacio goes to town depicting a restaurant where no one with any sense should ever eat and which health inspectors should have closed down years before. The chefs swill beer, wear no hats or other sanitary clothing and sweat profusely into the food. At one point a soda machine serving Cherry Coke breaks down and one of the waitresses fixes it with an elastic. Everyone is told that Cherry Coke is off the menu, but another waitress pays no heed, the machine goes into fire-hose mode and soon the kitchen is ankle deep in soda.

There are other such madcap scenes that would be funny except that the desperation of the workers to keep their jobs and their mostly vain hopes that the owner will keep his promise to get them proper papers shows how the system is rigged to exploit illegal immigrants. By the end, Pedro has been deserted by pretty much everyone and he vents his frustration in a self-destructive rampage.

The line chefs leave their stations and the waitresses flood into the kitchen as Pedro lies prostrate on the floor, covered with tomato sauce and food waste. In the closing shot, his face resembles Jesus on the cross. Such is the fate of the illegal immigrant in America.

By Michael Roddy