Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Back when I was still attending high school in Mexico there where two kinds of required reading, the type imposed by your school and the type passed around between brainy friends. Our school reading really wasn’t bad; our literature teacher was a major pervert who loved magic realism, the smuttier the better. I swear that at one point she had us reciting a poem about a gipsy ravaging a married country girl, extra credit for doing it in a costume. But back to my friends reading, a lot of my better books came from Marcos, who was already in college and therefore had access to a much better library than I did. At one point I received a copy of “The Perfume: Story of a Murderer” from him and read through the thing in a couple of days. It was enlightening to read a novel about a monster of self determination, who is driven only by the desire of reducing all that is beautiful to him into a single vial of essential oil. And while many  movie critics made the obligatory reference to Nirvana’s “Scentless apprentice” after looking the novel up on wikipedia, I had the first hand experience of having my mind blown by simultaneously reading the novels ending while listening to Heir Spigelman (by Moonspell) without realizing until that moment where the excerpt in the song came from.

So yeah, my expectations for this reportedly unfilmable movie where high, but that is offset by the fact that I generally tend to be pretty forgiving towards adaptations having adapted a couple of short stories for the stage myself back when I was in school. Fortunately director Tom Tykwer has an inventive visual flair that allows him to sidestep the trappings that many saw in bringing this movie to life, by exploring the main characters senses with camera dexterity instead of visual effects.  

Based around the life of fictional character Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw) in a real France, the movie follows the life of a great and terrible personage doomed to be forgotten by history, perhaps for the best. Born with an uncannily acute sense of smell into the foulest part of France, we are immediately introduced to the directors attempt to depict smell on the screen. During his birth we are treated to quick cuts of all the olfactory distractions that the repugnant market held: decaying fish, mangy dogs, maggots on meat, animals being eviscerated, and winos throwing up. This effect is simultaneously overwhelming and nauseating, which I guess means it’s successful. Latter on during Grenouille’s childhood as his ability to focus his nose develops the camera changes style, filming in long sweeps that travel great distances and zooming in on specific subjects with microscopic precision, simulating his ability to smell even the smallest detail from far away. And Ben Whishaw’s performance as Grenouille is great, he does a good job to convey the killers stunted speech and deformed body, coming off as both hapless and impertinent.

As the novels events unfold on the screen, there is one of great importance that we keep flashing back to. Grenouille’s chance encounter with a perfect scent, and his accidental murder of its rightful owner, a young redheaded girl. Haunted by her scent, he embarks on a quest to learn the ways of preserving aromas and capturing the essence of all things. This leads him to Giuseppe Baldini (Dustin Hoffman), a once famous but now fading perfume designer. In exchange for his tutelage Grenouille shares dozens of perfume ideas with the old maestro. Once he can no longer learn anything under Baldini he travels to Grasse, the Mecca of scent extraction. Along the way he stumbles into a cave that isolates him from the world. In the novel much time is spent on Grenouille’s inner journey, with page upon page of him composing aromas in his head. Tom Tykwer wisely skips to the point, within the cave Grenouille discovers that his body possesses no aroma of its own that that is the reason he is reviled by other people. The character sets embarks on a path that will lead to the murder of a dozen young women in order distil their scents into a perfect perfume for his body, one that will make him loved by all mankind.

While I refuse to give away the details of the ending, let me just tell anyone who read the book “yeah, they pull it off and it’s insane”. My only two big complaints with the movie are that its pacing leaves much to be desired and that Patrick Susskind’s eloquent passages were underused, this film would have actually benefited from more of the authors narrative. In the end by the time the epilogue rolls around it’s hard to care about flaws anymore, you have been bought off by a truly exceptional last act and feel almost unable to complain until the movies lingering scent wears off and you regain your senses.