Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

dir: Tom Tykwer
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A great book that never should have worked has, miracle of miracles, been made into a great film that could not, should not work.

Perfume: the Story of a Murderer (Das Parfum - Die Geschichte eines Mörders) by Patrick Suskind, is one of the most perfect books I have ever read. Even translated the German novel loses none of its most amazing qualities: an inspired and original story, an economical but expansive use of descriptive language to encapsulate one of the senses that you’d think would least be able to come across on paper, and a macabre, dark humour that delights as much as it horrifies. And THAT ending, oh my good god yes.

It’s the kind of book that potential writers read and then give up because of, convinced that they’ll never produce anything that good.

There’s even more going on in this amazing book that begs for it to be taught to school children from a young age. Well, maybe not from kindergarten onwards, but at least from when they’re young enough to appreciate greatness and stop picking their noses.

In calling it a perfect book, I mean that you can add nothing or subtract nothing from it to make it any better. Not a word, not a comma could be changed to improve it. It is perfect in what it has and what it doesn’t have, and what it has is an embarrassment of riches, both sensual and intellectual.

And from these unhumble origins, director Tom Tykwer, best known for Run Lola Run, has done the impossible by matching its greatness in this lush, superb adaptation.

I generally try to be sober (in thought, if not in liver) and reflective in my reviews to avoid sounding like an overexcited fanboy. The world already possesses enough overweight fanboys willing to make the internet hell for other people with their exaggerated sense of the importance of their own opinion and their willingness to tear down anyone with the temerity to not share the same perspective.

All the same, I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb and say that, apart from some of the writing for the overused, but necessary, voiceover (ably supplied by John Hurt), and one serious omission early on, this flick is as good an adaptation as the book deserves, and about as good as it gets. You have never seen a film like it. I have seen thousands of films, from the sublime to the ridiculous and everything in between, and I have never seen a film like.

The film begins with a starving little monkey of a man being dragged from his cell to a balcony overlooking a massive crowd of angry fishwives, costermongers and revolting peasants. An even angrier man screams out, reading from a scroll, the punishment this man will soon receive for his unspeakable crimes as the crowd cheers for his torment.

Gee, he must have done something pretty nasty.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw) is born on the filthy flagstones of the filthiest city in the world, Paris, in the 1700s. He clings to his miserable existence despite the many impediments put in the path of his living and breathing, because he has a divine mission.

You see, Grenouille is no ordinary human. Springing from such humble origins, by dint of divine miracle or mutation of evolution, he possesses a virtually supernatural sense of smell. Starved and unremarkable in every other way, covered in scars and burns from working in a tannery; one of the worst jobs in human history, his nose transcends the earthly realm of what most other humans could ever know.

It puts him in touch with the world in a unique and transcendent way. But, the thing is, his miserable life hasn’t really given him the option of using his powers for good instead of evil.

He can experience the world, with eyes closed and nostrils open, in almost perfect detail by smelling the location, state and nature of everything, almost in the way that a bat uses sonar to ‘see’ where it is going. This sense of scent is so powerful that nothing else seems to come close or matter as much as smelling everything that he can and knowing what each scent is called. Seeing and touching something is a paltry shadow compared to experiencing it with his nose.

After becoming entranced by the scent of a young, redheaded girl, and following it to its source, he becomes obsessed with the concept of preserving scents permanently. Even scents no-one would think could be preserved. Or should be.

This leads him to the perfume trade, and his apprenticeship to a master perfumer way past his use-by date as an innovator (Dustin Hoffman). Baldini, who lives in a rickety house precariously perched upon a bridge, is at first terrified of Grenouille, but swiftly sees that the good times are going to roll again with his help.

You see, Grenouille’s sense of smell is so great that he can, upon smelling a manufactured scent created by one of Baldini’s rivals, differentiate the different base elements that constitute it, as well as their proportions. Without even knowing their names, he can match the scents with their equivalents sitting in jars in rows surrounding him.

Baldini doesn’t stop to marvel long at such a gift and applies it to regain his good fortune. The problem is, he promised to teach Grenouille the techniques for extracting and preserving scents, and his knowledge of these techniques is limited. And Grenouille is not a patient being.

Grenouille’s first lesson is in the use of the alembic to extract scents from roses and other flowers with the process of distillation. When he tries to use this technique to preserve the smell of glass, of copper, of stone, and of cat and fails, he is miserable.

The processes, if not their application, are real. We get to learn of the different methods of deriving scents as well as the art or science of perfume-making. It’s not a coincidence that many of the techniques look like the pseudo-science of alchemy, where people believed matter could be transmuted from one state to another if only the right technique were used.

Even further is the concept that one can capture the essence of a thing using the right technique. Baldini teaches Grenouille that scent is the soul of something’s essence. He ultimately wants to capture souls through this dark alchemical art, if only he can learn the right technique.

He thence must travel to the Mecca of perfume-making in France: the mountain town of Grasse, surrounded by fields of lavender and jasmine, where he is desperate to learn of the other techniques for extracting and preserving scents. He’s quite committed to his task. Very focussed, in fact. One might say, insanely focussed.

But he’s not insane. He’s not really human for reasons I’ll let you find out for yourselves. I don’t mean that in the fantastical sense, as in he’s a demon or a leprechaun or an Eskimo. It’s just that he lacks something so fundamental to the human experience that it needs perforce to set him upon this track.

He has a calling, and that calling is to create a scent of such perfection, of such pure power that the world itself will bow down.

We follow him, incredulous, in his macabre journey, hounded by John Hurt’s relentless narration. He narrates more that Sir David Attenburough does in his multitude of nature documentaries. I guess it was unavoidable, since it’s not like this story could be told through dialogue, and Grenouille himself doesn’t get to talk much. It’s about 45 minutes before he gets a line of dialogue.

He doesn’t need to. The film accomplishes the impossible in telling his story, this story, and follows it doggedly to its singular conclusion. Since there’s no ability to express scent (yet) in cinema, the film compensates with at least three aspects: overamping the lush, sensual visuals, pumping up the orchestral score, and with the effective use of editing to incorporate the manner in which Grenouille experiences the world.

It’s an amazing story, and an amazing film. Ben Whishaw, looking like a half-starved, damaged Ian Brown from the early days of The Stone Roses crossed with a dirtier Noah Taylor, perfectly embodies the miserable existence of the monster that is Grenouille. The supporting cast, mostly unknowns except for Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman, do exactly what a supporting cast should do: they support this remarkable story.

Rachel Hurd-Wood as Laure is more object than subject, with her lush red hair and perfect pale skin, and the ultimate object of Grenouille’s affections, and is jailbait to boot, but she beautifully encapsulates what that bastard is pursuing and what the rest of us are supposed to long for nostalgically with all our hearts.

That ending… that ending… is as amazing and as inspired as every other bit of the film, and it’s a testament to the quality of the production that they retain the ending intact from the novel. The ending is so strong, so transporting that I literally had tears in my eyes at how tremendous it was. Sublime is the only word applicable to the messianic beauty of that denouement.

I can’t say this film will change the world, or your world, or make you run out and either start buying perfume or making perfume the Grenouille way. But I can say that I loved this film, and believe it to be one of the most amazing films of the last however many years that I’ve been lucky enough to see.

It defies genre despite the classifications it has been labelled with, it has no antecedents, no precursors, and nothing like it will come again. Visually seductive, replete with period detail and dark humour; it is immensely pleasurable despite or because of its macabre nature. I recommend this film to no-one because I want it all to myself.

Go watch something else.
9 times I wish the finale of my court cases ended like Grenouille’s out of 10

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“Forgive me, my son.” – the supreme irony of that line, Perfume: the Story of a Murderer.

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