Martin Scorsese’s Noir Games at the Berlinale. By Rita Di Santo

Scorsese’s Noire Games Reaches the Top.

Martin Scorsese has chosen Berlin Film Festival as the platform to show his latest movie, “Shutter Island”, a tale of haunting mystery and psychological suspense that unfolds entirely on a remote island housing a hospital for the criminally insane. The movie is based on a novel by Denis Lahane. This is the same writer of “Mystic River” which becomes an award winning film directed by Clint Eastwood.
“Shutter Island” is set in the 1950s at the height of the cold war. US Marshal, Teddy Daniels, and his partner are investigating the disappearance of a very dangerous criminal patient at the sanatorium of Shutter Island. A strong hurricane is heating the island, and everything becomes frenetic and confused. Surrounded by probing psychiatrists and dangerously psychopathic patients, nothing is quite what it seems. Rumours, the foreboding dark and rain, heighten an ambience where everything is uncertain.

This magnetic atmosphere, frame after frame, brings out all the emotional points of the novel. Scorsese sets up a perfect atmosphere that encapsulates all the beauty of the noire movies from the forties and the fifties, and from Ray to the German expressionists. Long shadows, creepy sounds, and a great cast infuse the film with life. Flashbacks and hallucinations play with chronologic time and the elusive nature of moment-to-moment reality. Anxiety, paranoia, fear, all feelings well mixed, recalling the paranoia created from the ungraspable political situation of the cold war, touching the ghosts of the Great War and the Nazi madness. Different threads and layers of the story combine from the shadowy noir to boldface. Scorsese knows all too well the vocabulary of the cinema, and sets everything in a perfect place: the actors, the lights, the dialogue, the sounds. Very few directors can reach his deep understanding of cinema, non-complex, that combines great style with a climate of the time. Not quite par excellence but an adroit expose of the noir style with the tight compression to time eliciting anxiety and pressure on the audience.