Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (***)

? Tom Tykwer’s (Run Lola Run) English-language adaptation of Patrick Süskind’s 1985 novel tells the tale of a Paris orphan, one Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw), born in 1738 with no assets, not even a sense of empathy, save a preternatural sense of smell. This, we know, will not prevent him from being sentenced, some years later, to death for crimes at which the title grimly hints. After an unpleasant childhood, Grenouille discovers the most intoxicating scent of all and seeks the counsel of a learned perfumer (Dustin Hoffman) on how he can preserve it. Some years later he can be found in a faraway town whose most beautiful resident (Rachel Hurd-Wood) resides with her wealthy, doting father (Alan Rickman). There Grenouille’s gifts, terrible and wonderful, reach full flower.

+ This is one of the more perfectly realized films I’ve seen. That is, I felt after seeing it that Tykwer had produced exactly the film he’d meant to, and I couldn’t say how the story might have been better told. The vividly disgusting opening sequence is a veritable flurry of filth that reminds us, as few historical films do, of the squalor attendant to European city life in centuries past. Throughout, sight and sound produce a stunning approximation of the more elusive sense of smell. Even if the producers had brought back the once-used Smell-O-Vision, it wouldn’t have been superior, since the smell Tykwer wants to conjure is beyond reality. It’s a shame he had to excise the novel’s more detailed descriptions of perfumery techniques, but the story itself is well preserved with an ending, or two of them, as fitting as it is bizarre.

- Obviously, this Perfume won’t be intoxicating to those who like their fairy tales sweet and light. The title character is the only one with much dimension, but he can be described generously as creepy and less so as sociopathic. Hoffman’s casting as a French perfumer is, let us say, offbeat.

= ***1/4 I admired this movie more than I liked it, and I’d bet a lot of people would like it less than I, but it was never dull. The penultimate scene, which can be described but oughtn’t to be, is at once wondrous and absurd, provoking both tittering laughter and wide-eyed awe from the audience at my screening. As befitting the fable this is, all is open to interpretation.

IMDb link

viewed at PFS screening