Review of Perfume The Story of a Murderer
Year: 2006 Reviewer: Chris Docker
Adapted from a 1985 modern classic, Perfume tells the story (or fable) of a child born in a revolting stench of 18th century Paris fishmarkets and who grows up to have such an uncannily developed sense of smell that he can compound perfumes to control people's behaviour. Long before pheromone and aromatherapy psychology were commonplace, our protagonist Jean-Baptiste Grenouille takes them to new levels, most of them evil. We follow him from his lower than lowly beginnings, into an orphanage, a tannery and then to an apprenticeship with master perfumier, Giuseppe Baldini - who is played most engagingly by Dustin Hoffman. To the illiterate and gifted Jean-Baptiste, the world of smells is the language of the world, and he wants to find and catalogue every smell and then learn how to save and reproduce it.
Bent on such a holy quest, such minor details as good and evil, life and death are, well, minor details. Having learnt everything he can from Master Baldini, he proceeds to the hallowed city of Grasse - a sort of perfumiers' Mecca - to discover more, treating himself to a period of meditation on the way, communing in the hills with his destiny and calling. Inspired by the smell of beautiful women - though not in a sexual way - he wants to capture it, to distil that essence of essences that is the soul of all beings. A local prostitute is less than impressed with his 'enflourage' method - which consists of coating her with animal fat and then scraping it off - and the diligent Jean-Baptiste elects for a more robust method of scientific enquiry faster than you can say scratch and sniff.
Considered for a long time to be one of those 'unfilmable' novels, Perfume could have been approached in a number of ways. The subtlety of French cinema, for instance, encouraging the viewer to grasp at that which is often only hinted, struck me as one possible way of getting us to conjure up a story based on sensations that are olfactory rather than visual. But there are many ways of dealing with the unseen and unseeable, as the romps of Harry Potter have demonstrated. With a background that has included remarkably off the wall films such as Run Lola Run and Heaven, one might have expected a whacky, artistic approach from German director Tom Tykwer, but for this large scale movie he seems to have shifted more to the sensational style of those Hollywood movies you love to hate. It is as if someone had warned him that, with a budget this size, it is safest to play film-making by numbers, especially those written in Euros on the completion bond. The result is a colourful, noisy, but very overdone production that makes the story look more like Dickens than Süskind. Urchins boasting cockney accents in gay Paris seemed particularly out of place, and a long and intrusive voice-over by John Hurt, however eminently done, reinforces the message that top actors and expensive sets alone were insufficient to tell the story.
Dustin Hoffman, barely recognisable as the powdered Baldini, is most impressive, and there are some nice moments when Laura, a noblewoman with a particularly nice smell it seems, brightens things up. Tykwer, whose direction has been rather pedestrian though most of it, rescues the film in the last few scenes with some crowd shots that are reminiscent of the work of photographer Spencer Tunick (the chap who does mass public displays of nudity) - only with added eroticism and choreography. While visually impressive, even these scenes fail to convey the believability inherent in the original novel. Even the slightest display of pubic regions has amusingly been edited out - in the same way that naked dead bodies earlier in the film always died (thoughtfully) in such poses as to keep similarly offending areas out of view. If aimed at an adults, Perfume, the Story of a Murderer is in danger of being patronising; yet the themes will be seen as too 'adult' for younger viewers. Not surprisingly, it is due for release in the UK on Boxing Day, when many audiences may be feeling too full of festive sustenance for anything more demanding. Süskind held out for a long time before agreeing to sell the film rights: this reviewer wishes he might have held out a bit longer.
Rating: 5/10
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