Written by Linda
February 07, 2009
We first meet the hero of our story, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw), quite literally snout-first. From the dank shadows of an 18th century French prison, a nose emerges. Pulled into the light by prison guards, with wrists and ankles shackled, Grenouille is being led to the town square for his public execution for the murder of a dozen women....
But let us flashback... via the smooth narration of John Hurt, who tells the weird and creepy story of Grenouille as though he is tucking us in for bed, and planting in our heads nightmares for when we fall asleep. Grenouille is born in the squalor of sprawling Paris, to a fishmonger who leaves him for dead, squirming amongst piles of filth and fishguts. He is brought to a hellish orphanage, where he, as an infant, freaks out the other kids immediately. You see, this cute little baby has quite the sniffer on him. The grasping infant hand clutches your tickling finger and pulls it straight to his nose for a prolonged and intimate whiff. No wonder the other kids want nothing to do with him.
As Grenouille grows into a young man, he works for a tanner and gets to visit the depths of the big city for the first time. He crosses paths with a beautiful young woman peddling fruit, follows her into an alley, and like Lenny in Of Mice and Men, accidentally kills the lass while trying to get a harmless inhalation of her luscious red hair. As her corpse cools, he paws at her, distraught to find that her scent is fading. He becomes obsessed with (wait for it) the scent of a woman, and it begins to drive his everyday thoughts.
And that, my friends, is merely the introduction to the story.
Grenouille's nose takes him to perfumer Giuseppe Baldini (powdered Dustin Hoffman), where he works as an assistant, creating new and glorious scents from shelves and shelves of bottled scented oils. But his obsession with the beautiful young woman's smell stays with him. He hears of an old tale from an ancient time, of a scent that was so powerful and wonderful that it literally saved the world, ended war and fighting, and brought about peace to all of humanity. He thinks he can create that scent, and it must have something to do with the perfection of a woman's smell. You can see where this is going...
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer has the tone of an elaborate historical X-Files episode. You will be grossed out, fascinated, and probably swept into this bizarre tale of obsession. For a sense that cannot be conveyed on screen (you can't smell scenes in a movie), director Tom Tykwer does a surprisingly good job making up for it with the rich visual imagery of the film. There are sprawling fields of lavender, piles of steaming fish guts, cascading ringlets of red hair that exude the fresh perfumed scent of Breck shampoo. You can just about smell what Grenouille is after.
For an unknown actor, Ben Whishaw does surprisingly well as Grenouille. He is constantly filthy (you can just about smell him, too), and is simultaneously despicable, pathetic, creepy, and pitiful. He almost comes across vaguely sympathetic, as a desperate artist who is simply trying to create his masterwork. Whishaw is joined by a strong supporting cast of both the recognizable (Hoffman and Alan Rickman) and new faces (Rachel Hurd-Wood, as the ultimate object of Grenouille's, er, "project"). There are times, especially towards the end that the film's pace tends to struggle, and there is a climactic scene that is so incredibly bizarre that the audience started chuckling in disbelief... But otherwise, Perfume had me. You could practically smell the scent of discomfort in the theater as Perfume made the audience squirm in their seats.
