Reminiscing the floating world: about EDOnism and a giant catfish

Edonism is the tragic story of James Hallway, an English businessman from the UK who comes to Tokyo looking to fulfill his dreams and lead a peaceful life with his beautiful wife, Sophie. Instead he finds toil, torment and alcoholism. Unable to bear his descent into self-destruction, Sophie leaves, abandoning him to his downward spiral into the gutter. Day by day, his reality is consumed by hallucinations and weird perceptions. Once things can’t get any worse, he falls into a coma.

When he awakens from the coma, he begins to learn some terrifying truths about his condition and his connection to a long-forgotten legend from ancient Japan. Together with the resourceful Dr Geena Landlord he attempts a desperate quest of discovery that leads them both to the very heart of a conspiracy involving a secret government order and the enigmatic being known as the The Cat Fish. 

The sci-fi mystery movie "EDOnism" filmed in Tokyo, directed, written, edited by Alessandro Fantini and produced by Lorenzo Fantini in 2010, had its Italian premiere at the first edition of "La Selva Nera" international film festival in Selvazzano Dentro, Padua, founded and directed by film critic Massimo Bezzati and filmmaker-writer Stefano Bovi.

 When I faced for the first time the idea to shoot a movie in Tokyo, while I was discussing the hypothesis with then soon-to-be EDonism producer Lorenzo Fantini during his latest stay in Italy in 2009, I immediately thought that the script should have deal with something gigantic, frightening and epic. No other city in the world is able to suggest the feeling of a majestic and intimidating human beehive as much as Tokyo. It seemed that all my obsessions for movies like Blade Runner, Akira and Ghost in the Shell as well as my interest in Shintoism, Ukiyo-e art,  and Suehiro Maruo, would have take me sooner or later  to nowhere but to the enigmatic land of geisha, samurai, Godzilla and hi-tech marvels.  As usual, the way I fleshed out the concept and the story was closer to the process of conceiving a painting or a comic than to a traditional pre-production of a movie.
EDOnism FB page: https://www.facebook.com/edonismmovie/

Director, editor, animator, screenwriter, co-producer and soundtrack composer: AFan Alessandro Fantini
Producer, art director, co-writer, casting director and location manager: Lorenzo Fantini
Line producer: Miles Elliott
Assistant producer: Lucy King
Post production supervisor: Nate Jensen
Make up artist: Kana Yoshida
Cast: Sacha Mühlebach, Helene Salvini Fujita, Hiro Super, Lucy King, Lorenzo Fantini, Kyle H., Nate Jensen, Tony Evans, Alessandro Fantini, Cyrus Malekani.

Genre: Sci-fi thriller, drama, adventure
Shooting format: HDV
Runtime: 65 min.
Country: Italy, Japan
Language: English
Filming locations: Tokyo
Release date: June 2010

Los Angeles - 30 after Roy, 34 after Ridley

Opening scene from the "Blade Runner 2049" teaser trailer 

Since the first time I watched it on a tv channel in the mid nineties, I've used to pay a periodic visit to that rusty and gloomy Los Angeles set in the imaginary vintage future conceived by Ridley Scott, Jordan Cronenweth, Syd Mead and Philip K. Dick. 

 I got so accustomed to its hazy and cyber-gothic mood that I've often transposed and filtered it into my artworks, tales and movies, specially "EDOnism", filmed 6 years ago in some Tokyo locations dramatically reminiscent of Animoid Row, some of them enriched by a night snow that now seems to have replaced the rain in the upcoming installment.

 

Up and down: stills from "EDOnism" directed by Alessandro Fantini and produced by Lorenzo Fantini in 2010.

Honestly I never expected to see an "updated" version of "Blade Runner" 34 years after its (initially unsuccessful) release.  As many other admirers of that vision, I still consider it a contained (thin) story whose strenght relies mostly on its swarming congeries of visual details, plot holes and paranoid ambiguities that don't need to be clarified at all. Actually I find quite hard to define it a traditional movie, as I prefer to think about it as an emotive sandbox or a sparkling acquarium where I can see my irrational thoughts swimming like weird fishes of the deep (a proof of the spiritual poignancy of this metaphor, again, can be appreciated in the love sequence of "EDOnism").

Nevertheless, my first reaction to the teaser of 19th December was warily optimistic. Its unsettling and enigmatic tone was quite close to what I've imagined keeping in mind all the news and behind-the-scene info, concept art and photos released over the last 6 months. Highly commendable is the way the Canadian director Denis Villeneuve and famed DOP Roger Deakins have homaged the slow pace of the scene of Deckard exploring the Bradbury building and the orange stillness of the first "Tyrell sequence" of the '82 movie (even though I suspect this new scene isn't set on Earth, or probably is a "memory" inserted in someone's brain related to the "desert" mentioned during the VK test of Holden) as well as the music sounds like a fitting Trent Reznor's rearrangement of some elements excerpted from the original Vangelis sonic dome. Despite I hoped this wasn't  just a remix conceived for the trailer but a little taste of the overall style of the final soundtrack, a couple days later the composer Johann Johannsson (who already collaborated with Villeneuve for "Sicario", "Prisoners" and "Arrival") stated that none of that belongs to his new score in progress.

 Ryan Gosling, aka "LAPD officer K", enters the deserted temple-casino that has become the new shelter of Deckard (and his four-legged companion).

Admittedly, so far the only element of the trailer that didn't really convinced me is the new scruffy and "Han Solo-esque" look of Deckard, but this appearence could find a "raison d'être" in the  more "low-profile" life style adopted by the retired replicant hunter. Even the new photos featured on the last Entertainment Weekly, clearly taken on set during the pauses between shooting (and probably not really representative of the final aesthetic), show a different, less grit and dark mood compared to the '82 movie.  It's all up to Villeneuve and who will decide the final cut to make sure this tonal shift will pay off on the big screen on the next 6th October, inheriting and enriching (not replicating) the poetic soul of the first masterwork. Otherwise, he knows its fate will be to get lost in time "like tears in snow".

MUSING ABOUT MOVIEMAKING

The making of EDOnism can be defined as a kind of gestation, considering that about 9 months have passed between the first outline and the end of the post-production period. During this arc of time a lot of ideas, coincidences, revelations and unforeseen events contributed to the uniqueness of the movie. It has been a grand scale effort propelled by the target of finalizing a project that at the beginning could sound utopist, if compared to the very limited range of technical and financial resources at our disposal. Although the thematic root of the story derived from the seismic emergency that unfortunately characterized the 2009 here in Abruzzo (that’s still a dramatic issue on these days), the earthquake phenomenon doesn’t represent an excuse to give to the movie a more humanitarian or social appeal, as some documentaries and movies have done after the disaster. Indeed, what interested me most was to give a poetic representation to the link between the inner realm of human soul and the enigmatic exterior world, a theme that has been often at the core of my previous movies (as well as paintings and novels). Somehow the earthquake becomes the symbolic projection of a human interior cataclysm, an extraordinary event subverting the concept of reality, slowly getting wider proportions and involving the entire community of a city. Tokyo provided a colossal set to the movie, an emotive environment that neither digital effects nor scenography will ever be able to reproduce with the same visual power, offering the perfect physical backdrop to the metaphysical journey of the protagonist. Indeed its breathtaking amount of details properly evoked the hyper realistic visionary ambiance that I imagined while I was writing the script.
I’d like to dedicate Edonism not only to all the victims of earthquakes, but also to the people still trying to restore their humanity among the ruins of their soul.

http://www.edonism-movie.com