"Perfume" Movie Review

A conventional movie tells a story with sights and sounds, playing to our eyes and ears with brightness and bombast. So how does one tell a story about scent and smell, that most primitive, subtle and evocative of senses, without being able to create scents and smells in the theatre? The challenge is akin to making a silent film about Beethoven.

Tom Tykwer, the German director of Run, Lola, Run, has done it by presenting images so vivid that they challenge the viewer to recall the scents from memory. The ephemeral sense of sublime smells and putrid odors are the ghosts that haunt this film about a serial killer with a unique obsession.

In 18th Century France, a newborn baby christened Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is endowed with a preternatural sense of smell, but with no bodily scent to his skin. Orphaned in the moments after his birth in a reeking Parisian fishmarket, he is passed between oppressive homes for parentless children before being sold into slavery in a leather tannery as a young child. His only joy and recreation in life is in experiencing and perfectly remembering each and every scent in his world. His greatest anguish in life is the fleeting nature of scent. As a young man, he offers his services to the aging perfumer Giuseppi Baldini, who sets him on a course to learn the secrets to capturing the essence of every aroma possible.

Born with a conscienceless, sociopathic personality, Grenouille soon resorts to murder in order to collect the most priceless scents of all - the scents of young virgin girls. The original novel by Patrick Suskind is uninhibited in its delerious flights of bizarre imagination, creating scenes of such outrageous surreality that one can only surrender to the author's delightful sense of morbid fantasy.

Where "Perfume" the movie stumbles slightly is in trying to present the fever dream images that occur near the end of the novel as Grenouille nears and then meets his fate. Tykwer softens the nature of the events, removing some of the graphic depravity from a film that already does present perverse eroticism in a sensual, almost shocking way. While "Perfume" is certain to repel as many viewers as it delights, it's a definite treat for those dark sensualists who have an open mind for twisted fables and a taste for poisonous confections.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006)
Directed by Tom Tykwer
Screenplay by Andrew Birkin, Bernd Eichinger, and Tom Tykwer

Stars:
Ben Whishaw ................ Jean-Baptiste Grenouille
Dustin Hoffman ............. Giuseppe Baldini
Alan Rickman ................. Antoine Richis
Rachel Hurd-Wood ....... Laura Richis
Corinna Harfouch .......... Madame Arnulfi
John Hurt ......................... Narrator
Karoline Herfurth ............ The Plum Girl

Rated R for aberrant behavior involving nudity, violence, sexuality, and disturbing images