Directed by:
Tom TykwerCinematography:
Frank GriebeCast:
Ben Whishaw, Alan Rickman, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Dustin Hoffman, Karoline Herfurth, David Calder, Simon Chandler, Sian Thomas, Jessica Schwarz, Corinna Harfouch (more)Plots(1)
In the slums of 18th century Paris, a baby is born to an impoverished fishmonger who abandons her child in the stinking, rotten detritus of a street market. Passed over to monks as a charity case, they can find no one to care for the child - for Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is no ordinary child. Grenouille has the extraordinary ability to decipher the complex swirl of smells around him but soon realizes, to his horror, that he has no smell of his own. He apprentices himself to a perfumer and quickly masters the art. One day he smells the essence of something so exquisite that he is determined to capture it: a beautiful young virgin on the brink of womanhood. With an artist's desire to create perfection - yet without those "ordinary" feelings of moral responsibility - we follow Jean-Baptiste along his murderous quest to create the ultimate perfume for his own adornment: leading to a rising storm of terror across the French countryside. (Pathé Distribution UK)
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Reviews (12)
If anyone should have adapted the book "Perfume", it was probably only Tykwer, because a book with such a reputation requires a director of his caliber. It's a slight mindfuck in places, but I think it sufficiently rehabilitates the good aspects of modern German culture. Ben Whishaw is properly disgusting, Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman ensured the general public's attention and Corinna Harfouch and Karoline Herfurth added their inimitable faces to the whole.
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Tom Tykwer is very inventive and has a head full of ideas, which he throws at the viewer with an unprecedented force, and he managed to adapt “Perfume” to the movie screen as well as possible. If we add great actors and the truly beautiful visuals, the occasional plot gaps and excessive running time can be forgiven. A truly unique story, a truly unique film.
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With Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Tykwer has taken on one of the most difficult challenges, namely how to portray the sense of smell in an audiovisual way. Especially if that sense of smell drives the plot. And super-especially if the hero of the plot is a silent, ruthless psychopath who destroys young girls for his own fulfillment. And because he fails at this challenge, the film fails too, the entire time. And yet it fails with never-before-seen grandiosity. The ways of depicting the protagonist's abilities here only really work in the case of the vile smell, where the opening fish market, for example, visualizes the disgusting environment with quick cuts and zooms. But when he starts to break bread with the other side of the olfactory spectrum, the film runs into the problem that there aren't really that many universal scents, since everyone has a different idea of what is pleasing and beautiful, and so from the first act onwards we are downright inundated with all manner of flowers, petals, and accentuated colors like a commercial for scented candles. Then when the protagonist uses his sense of smell for a practical purpose, namely to stalk his victims, it comes across as a cool superhero ability again. The problems mentioned above, however, stem from the decision to conceive the novel as a monumental historical fresco, where the viewer can turn away from the unpleasant story and simply enjoy the period setting. Hence all the crowd scenes, the meticulously soiled buildings, the dozens of rotten extras, the hundreds of costumes, the panoramic shots, and the frequent changes of location. But for the plot itself to work, it would have to be perceived in a much more intimate, individual way. After all, we’re talking here about one man's efforts to achieve absolute perfection and beauty through extreme means. The monumental treatment may try to emphasize the universality of such a quest, but in my opinion this is impossible when the subject is a sense as distinctive as that of smell.
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In some scenes, Tykwer reaches the edge of perfection itself, but it fails to achieve a full set of stars due to a fairly large number of shortcomings. Primarily the middle part which could easily have been cut by about twenty minutes without doing any harm. This attempt at imparting a perfume just by means of a combination of visuals and music didn’t work completely, nor could it. Even so, in many scenes, when Tykwer tries hard, it is emotionally strong and stays in your memory for long after. I also liked the really bizarre closing third of the picture which could easily compete with some of the really big “weirdities" from Asia. I can’t say that Perfume is a great movie, but it is certainly unforgettable, and that means a lot. ♫ OST score: 5/5
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Perfume is a work of art, a parable and an allegory, masterfully wrapped up in a beautiful, spectacularly attractive mainstream package. It is an amazing sensualist film about everthing that a talented person can do and, mainly, create when driven by love. I don’t feel sorry for Grenouille’s single victim; I feel sorry for Grenouille. And I admire him. Tom Tykwer brings perfect balance to the collage of drama, thriller and comedy, the sets are amazing, and the actors – including Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman – fully embody their characters (and that’s not even to mention Ben Whishaw...) and some scenes (the maze, the climax) are exemplary demonstrations of film editing. Perfume reawakened in me a memory of the melancholic student days of Branagh’s Frankenstein.
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