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Richard Sanderson danced only one summer.
Tasting the juicy honey of success, he did it only once. Sanderson, in fact, performed "Reality," written by Vladimir Cosma. A slow, sentimental, dreamy song, a bit sappy if you will, but perfect for describing the amorous heartbeats of a teenager, with Richard's clear voice.
Vladimir Cosma, whose name is quite debated nowadays and not very fitting with the song's atmosphere, is a well-known Romanian arranger and pianist, a little Henry Mancini from Eastern Europe.
Ah, The Apple-Way!
The movie that has marked generations, making teenagers and nostalgic adults sigh, but also causing panic among those who did not know exactly how to face their adolescence without Richard Sanderson's soundtrack around.
Let's say it right away: this is not a movie, it's a mystical experience. It's a deep journey into shining and never-erased layers of adolescence. It's the cinematic demonstration that, in the '80s, teenagers lived in a parallel dimension and in short circuit with the adult world. Where everything was accompanied by languid looks, placid smiles, parties where the illusion of a ballroom reigned. Illusion because indeed no one was really dancing, because it was so cool to stay in the shadows, submerged in some little couch. With powerful walkmans, talismans of secret and magnetic power, that seemed to have the power to induce deep emotions from a half-smile, given to the friend next to them and mistaken for their own.
Vic, the protagonist, is a teenager like many, except she lives in a reality where everyone seems a bit more beautiful, a bit more confused, and definitely more obsessed with apples than is reasonable. When Vic discovers love, she doesn't do it with the calm of those who let themselves be carried by events, but with the intensity of someone who has just discovered the existence of the fourth dimension: everything that will happen after will be only ecstasy and detachment from any utilitarian sensation.
The real enigma of this movie is not the adolescent drama, but the incredible ability of the students to organize parties that seem orchestrated by an experimental filmmaker, a kind like Nicolas Winding Refn, for example. Many scenes are all a downtempo kaleidoscope, soft lights, heart-wrenching music blushed by the advance of neon lights, unjustified slow motions… It's as if every party was directed by a director in existential crisis.
Ah, the walkman scene. The moment that confused almost every kid of the '80s. When Vic puts on the headphones and "Reality" begins to play, it becomes clear that we're not facing a normal love story: it's a cosmic issue, an interplanetary leap, an interdimensional passage that will take Vic and her adolescent love into a heart-wrenching dimension. In the end, The Apple-Way is not a movie, but a mystical experience that leaves you with a sense of vague melancholy and the certainty that adolescent love is the most serious thing there is before taking out a mortgage for a house.
And so after staging among free-range hormones this ephemeral allegory of growth and its inevitable dissonances, after all the dances, the tremors, the winks at the discovery of sex, the unripe apples whose time seems never to arrive, they mature treacherously into the romanticism of a single banal and perfect song.
That "Reality," sappy slow catch, those notes we rocked to endlessly.
And without realizing that often we danced that slow standing still, with eyes closed and alone.
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