The sharply etched (if thinly imagined) characterizations in the film “Cha Cha Real Smooth” keep the story moving, precisely and mechanically, like the gears and wheels of a luxury watch.
The twenty-five-year-old writer, actor, and director Cooper Raiff builds his precocity into his movies. In his first feature, “Shithouse,” from 2020, which he also edited and produced, he plays a lonely college freshman, still tethered to his mother and his sister back home, who mistakes his crush on his resident adviser for a romance. His new film, “Cha Cha Real Smooth” , has a similar setup that builds a bigger dramatic bridge over a bigger gap in age and experience.
The most striking thing about “Cha Cha Real Smooth” is the variety and density of dramatic detail that Raiff, as screenwriter, elaborates within the stark lines of his premise. Yet his virtuosity comes with a strangely sentimental, self-regarding air; the entire film is tinged with a cloying glaze that seeps into the interstices of the drama and limits his characters’ range of motion. Its sticky-sweetness becomes part of its very substance.
Andrew’s romantic preference is set up as destiny in a brief prelude when, as a twelve-year-old bar-mitzvah guest, he falls in love with a young woman about ten years his senior—the party-starter. Then the action leaps ten years ahead, to something like the present day . When Andrew finishes college, his plan is a sentimental one: he moves back home and gets a job at a fast-food joint in order to make money and follow his college girlfriend to Barcelona, where she’s studying.
Andrew becomes a babysitter for Lola, whose confidence he has won, and he gets hired by parents as the party-starter for their children’s bar and bat mitzvahs. As his relationship with Domino deepens, and he makes his all-too-obvious feelings known to her, their lives grow increasingly complicated. Fiercely protective of his mother , who is bipolar, Andrew is openly contemptuous of his stern stepfather, Greg , a pharmaceuticals executive.
There’s a lot going on in “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” and Raiff makes it happen in an earnest whirl of sugar-spangled dialogue and kicky offshoots of incidents within incidents—ricochets and sidebars reminiscent of screwball comedy. The movie’s sharply etched characterizations keep the story moving, precisely and mechanically, like the gears and wheels of a luxury watch. Raiff lavishes attention on supporting characters; the movie is an outpouring of affection for performers and characters alike.
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