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.

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viewed at PFS screening

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (**)

A farcical “making of” documentary about the nonexistent movie version of a classic novel. Star Steve Coogan is likeable and often funny, but the concept quickly wears thin.

This movie bears a bit of explaining. The short version is, it’s a fake “making of” documentary about a movie that wasn’t actually made. We see parts of that movie, an adaptation of the “unfilmable” 18th-century (real) literary classic The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne. In these scenes, Steve Coogan plays the title character (and his father). Like his counterpart in the novel, Coogan as Shandy narrates his own life. In one funny bit, he disparages the performance of the child actor playing his younger self. But for most of the movie, Coogan plays Coogan. Should you see this film, it will help you to know that in the UK he is well known for playing a fake TV talk-show host called Alan Partridge who has real guests (akin to Martin Short’s Jiminy Glick). Here he’s a fake Steve Coogan in a real movie. (An Alan Partridge movie looms on the horizon.) Other people, such as Yank Gillian Anderson, play themselves too in the mockumentary portion, but others don’t. For instance, Kelly McDonald, as the mother of Coogan’s child, is called Jenny. This all sounds very clever, and it is, even if the funniest scene echoes There’s Something About Mary. If this sounds like your thing, I shouldn’t dissuade you from seeing it. But whenever I saw Coogan acting pompous on screen, I was reminded that it was actually Coogan modestly poking fun at himself, and pretty soon, for me, the lack of a real storyline wore thin.

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Casanova (**3/4)

Heath Ledger is the famous lover, trying to escape the law while wooing a feminist (Sienna Miller) in Venice. With snappy dialogue and a revisionist plot making use of a mistaken-identity premise, it may remind you of a lesser Shakespeare in Love.

In an odd coincidence, Heath Ledger will be playing both a gay cowboy and a famous lothario, possibly in the same multiplex. Casanova’s introduced here stealing away from a nunnery, having apparently seduced most of the occupants. Only a hastily arranged marriage can save him from some rather draconian morality laws that they seem to have had in Venice back in the day (the 1700s), even though hardly anyone in town pays them any mind. And only winning over his true love (Sienna Miller) can save him from the hastily arranged marriage.  

Casanova appeals to the belief—fantasy, some would say— that the promiscuous man is only wanting for a woman who is his equal before settling down. Ideally, the woman should be so smart and industrious that she herself appears virginal. So it is with Miller’s character, who has been writing feminist treatises under a pseudonym. She has no time for a notorious floozy like Casanova, so he too pretends to be somebody else. A certain amount of comedy ensues, aided by Oliver Platt (wearing a fat suit) as a visiting businessman being conned by both of them. Like director Lasse Hallström’s previous Chocolat, it’s a period film whose heroine has a rather modern sensibility that gets her in trouble. And like that film, it’s a big fluffy fairy tale more than a historical drama (though the filming was on location). It reminded me of Shakespeare in Love in feel, perhaps in part because an uncredited Tom Stoppard, that film’s writer, supposedly polished up some of the dialogue. Overall, I found it a bit familiar, but it’s worth a look if you find the premise amusing.

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circulated via email 12/22/05 and posted online 9/20/13