Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Before too much time passes, I want to write something about Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. It is based on Patrick Süskind's novel of the same name from the mid-1980s. It tells the tale of Grenouille, our brooding anti-hero born into the squalor of 18th century Paris to a mother working at a fish stall. As she beheads fish, she takes a moment to give birth to Grenouille only to abandon him to die. Passersby notice the infant and exert their wrath onto his mother by hanging her. The child is sent to an orphanage of Dickensian proportions where the youngsters there try to smother the boy when he begins crying. Luckily he is saved. As he grows up, we find that Grenouille has the most incredible sense of smell and, shunned by his fellow orphans, he builds his obsession with taking in the scents of things around him. The boy is eventually sold to a dreadful-looking tanner and he not only learns the trade, but also is placed into whole other world of scents. John Hurt provides voiceover narration here early in the film to fill in the details and give background. It works just fine but, since director Tom Tykwer used it only when he needed to save time, the narration's appearances are uneven. However, this doesn’t distract from the film.

The pivotal moment in Grenouille's life comes when he catches a whiff of a young woman selling fruit in the streets. He follows her, reveling in the sweet scent of her tender, pale skin. Thinking that something was amiss, she stops and turns around at one point only to find Grenouille's nose hovering not even an inch away from neck. This upsets her and she angrily takes evasive action. But Grenouille's nose is too good and he finds her sitting on a bench enjoying a sample of the luscious fruit she proffers. Grenouille approaches and eventually kills the woman. He drags her body away from the sight of anyone who might walk by and tears her dress open so he can have her scent all to himself. Truth be told, I found this scene to be very erotic and I suspect that Tykwer shot it that way because he occasionally cuts to the face of the lifeless woman as if to remind the viewer that there's actually something disgusting going on before our eyes. Having inhaled the woman, Grenouille's obsession is fully unleashed.

He begins by talking his way into being an acolyte for Baldini, a perfumer who is past his prime. Baldini is played by Dustin Hoffman who is either dreadfully miscast or gives a performance that is so over the top that it's great – your choice. From Baldini, Grenouille learns how to distill essential oils and, perhaps just as importantly for his ends, that there are 13 components to the perfect scent. The apprenticeship goes downhill when Grenouille is caught trying to distill the essence of a cat and he leaves Baldini for Grasse, in Southern France. The area is supposed to be the apex of perfumery and folks there have a secret method for obtaining scent. Our anti-hero weaves his way into the community and begins his endeavor of compiling the 13 components of the perfect scent.

I absolutely loved this film and was completely flummoxed when I read a review stating that Tykwer wasn't able to capture the olfactory aspects of the story on film. In fact, wrote the reviewer, film is in capable of such a feat. Yet this person credited the book with being able to do so despite the paucity of scents in that medium. To my estimation, Tykwer did a great job of visualizing the sense of smell. For instance, take the beginning of the film. While the squalor of the Paris streets are perhaps not hyper-historically accurate, the scenes are rendered with no grime or grit spared. I thought the film did a good job of porting the olfactory to the visual. There's a nice mix of shots of the objects being smelled & their surroundings and shots of Grenouille's facial expressions, close-ups of his nose, &c.

I've never read the book but a lot of people who have are critical of the film for an element of the original story that was deemphasized in the movie. This is the fact that Grenouille has no scent himself. The novel apparently uses this to explain Grenouille's pariah status within society and, while the film mentions this, it does so mostly in passing. While this condition is central to the novel, it isn't revealed until much later in the film. Having never read the book, I don't want to get too far into this. Instead I'd prefer to ask whether or not the film made sense as it is. Are Grenouille's motivations explained well-enough so that his actions make sense? To me, they are. The film is a story of a weird, sick, twisted bastard and I loved it.