Relationships are tricky, full of delicate negotiations that occasionally degenerate into full-on power struggles. How do they survive when you add a big age difference and sceptical friends?
Cha Cha Real Smooth, which is out in the UK on Friday, is an earnest drama about an aimless 22-year-old university graduate who falls for an enigmatic thirtysomething mother, played by Dakota Johnson. It is a subject that Johnson is familiar with, being in a much-scrutinised relationship with Coldplay singer Chris Martin, who is 13 years her senior. “I had a lot of life really young, so I think I feel older,” she has said.
Elsewhere in culture, age gaps have been explored in the coming-of-age drama Palm Trees and Power Lines; the BBC’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, which follows university student Frances and her tryst with the older, married Nick; Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, in which Emma Thompson plays a fiftysomething widow who hires a much younger sex worker; and Lena Dunham’s new film, Sharp Stick, about an intergenerational workplace romance. On ITV2’s Love Island, 19-year-old Gemma Owen’s pairing with Davide Sanclimenti, 27, has led some viewers to complain.
