‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’ finds heart in mother-daughter connection
“Cha Cha Real Smooth,” at least on paper, might sound a little familiar.
The sophomore feature of filmmaker Cooper Raiff is about a 22-year-old who returns to his childhood home in suburban New Jersey the summer after graduation and develops a complicated relationship with a young mom. Ever since Benjamin Braddock coasted back to his childhood home in “The Graduate,” postgrad malaise has been an endlessly renewable resource for young filmmakers looking for inspiration.
But that wasn’t the case for “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” which is currently available to stream on Apple TV+. The postgrad aspect wasn’t even part of the initial idea.
“The original core idea for the movie was this deep, massive, unspoken, eternal bond between a mom and her disabled daughter,” Raiff said.
Raiff has a younger sister who was born with holoprosencephaly, a condition that results in the abnormal development of the brain. In his sister Andrea’s case, her brain didn’t divide into two hemispheres. He said she can neither walk nor talk.
“My mom one time said to me something like, ‘My life will forever be defined by Andrea’s stages,’” Raiff said. “It knocked me right out. I didn’t know what to do with it other than write it down.”
He started writing some scenes but realized at some point that he was writing a relationship not a movie. So he threw a version of himself in there, the post-grad Andrew, and concocted a reason why he’d be coming into contact with this mother, Dominio ( Dakota Johnson, who also produced ), and her teenage daughter, Lola. Andrew would get hired as a party-starter on the bar mitzvah circuit.
“Originally I was writing the movie about my sister. In a perfect world, honestly, I would have had her act in it,” he said.
But, he laughed, “she would have like looked into the camera the whole time.”
The part of Lola clicked easily for Burghardt.
“I didn’t feel like I ever needed to like, like, break my brain over her,” Burghardt said. “I didn’t feel like I needed to think so much about, like, social nuances and all of those things because she was on the spectrum. I never felt like I had to question myself or my abilities to play her.”