Weekend films

'Lobsters in Manhattan', a cuisine as cultural melting pot

Alonso Ruizpalacios' new film has arrived, starring Rooney Mara. Also among the new releases is 'The Love that Doesn't Die'.

6 June 2025

3' min read

Cinema and food often give rise to an explosive combination that is increasingly represented within today's audiovisual landscape. Suffice it to think, among the most recent products, of the success of a series such as 'The Bear' or the good results of 'Boiling Point', a film in a sequence plan by Philip Barantini, a director who later became even more famous with the miniseries 'Adolescence'.

This week saw the arrival in Italian cinemas of 'Lobsters in Manhattan', a new work by Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios, where cuisine is transformed into a cultural melting pot.

Initially we follow the story of a girl who has left Mexico to go to work in a New York restaurant, where Pedro, a man she has known for a long time, is already there. But very soon the film becomes a choral work in which the dynamics of the restaurant's kitchen serve as a metaphor for many socio-political reflections, inherent to integration and the sharing of experiences between very different people.

Also central to the film is the tender and tormented love story between Pedro and Julia, an American waitress. When Julia discovers she is pregnant, Pedro tries to hold her back, dreaming of a possible future with her, especially now that the management has promised to help him obtain a residence permit. But when a sum of money mysteriously disappears from the restaurant safe, everything changes. Internal investigations trigger suspicions, tensions and confrontations.

The culinary universe thus becomes a pretext for reasoning about human relationships, both affectionate and conflicting, in a highly symbolic micro-universe, where no one trusts the other and where one's own work space must be preserved at all costs.

“Aragoste a Manhattan” e gli altri film della settimana
Photogallery4 foto

Exuberant style

After impressing with films such as 'Güeros' and 'Museo', Ruizpalacios continues to show his good talent with this film, which is almost entirely in black and white and makes the most of its author's exuberant style.

The beginning and the ending are excessive, also and above all from a directorial point of view, just as there are a couple of scenes that are too over the top, but these limitations are compensated for by moments of the highest level, starting with a splendid and very long shot that marks one of the most difficult moments in the kitchen work of the various characters.

The result is an uneven, but powerful film, which has as its added value a very tightly-knit cast: while most of the actresses and actors are little known, the presence of a star of the star-studded film industry such as Rooeny Mara, as Julia, should be noted.

Finally, it should be mentioned that 'Lobsters in Manhattan' takes its cue from the excellent play 'The Kitchen' by British playwright Arnold Wesker.

Love that does not die

New releases include Gilles Lelouche's 'The Love that Doesn't Die'.

Set in the early 1980s, the film tells the love story of a young couple, Jackie and Clotaire.

They come from very different backgrounds, she is a well-off upper middle-class girl and he is a young man of humble origins. They grow up in the same port city in North-East France, attend the same high school and cross paths every day between the docks. The film spans twenty years and follows the two from their adolescence, when they fall madly in love. But Jackie and Clotaire soon end up drifting apart, taking very different paths.

The premises for an important product were all there, but the film gets lost in the course of its excessive length (about 160 minutes), ending up being verbose and redundant, especially in the central part.

Some notable moments are there, but they remain watered down within an overall vision that is unoriginal and incapable of shaking you as it would have wished. The feeling is that of being faced with a largely wasted opportunity.