Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw), born in the slums of 18th century France, has a super-human ability to detect and distinguish scents. His accidental killing of a maiden leads him on a quest to preserve all smells. After studying with an out-of-vogue perfume maker (Dustin Hoffman), Grenouille attempts to make the perfect perfume from the essences of thirteen young girls. With the body count rising, Antoine Richis (Alan Rickman) believes that his extraordinarily beautiful daughter (Rachel Hurd-Wood) must be the final victim of the unseen madman. He is correct.
A marketing executive’s nightmare, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a character study of an obsessed sociopath, a brooding drama, a satire on politics and religion, a dark comedy, a beautiful fantasy, and a slasher wrapped with an art house ribbon. How do you sell that? The ad campaign has focused on the horror aspect, which will leave a lot of gore-hounds feeling cheated. The murders are mostly off-screen and bloodless, and don’t take over the plot until nearly two hours have passed. But it wouldn’t help to play up the fantasy, which is almost completely confined to the climax, or the comedy, which comes and goes. Poor ad agencies. This isn’t going to play in Peoria.
Whatever audience does make it in the doors is going to see a beautiful, though gritty movie, that will instigate water cooler discussions whenever two viewers meet, provided they meet by a water cooler. As for the beauty: sometimes, beauty includes maggots, filth, and naked corpses. Director Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola, Run) films what was claimed to be unfilmable, Patrick Süskind’s bestselling novel, having little trouble bringing the stench of Paris to the audio/visual medium. Through faded smoke wisps, focused beams of light, close-ups of nostrils, and an over abundance of things you’d never want to inhale, Tykwer creates an olfactory flick, minus the scratch-and-sniff cards.
The first two-thirds of the film is an examination of a killer, broken into two major sections, his formative years and his time at the perfumery. We see Grenouille’s birth (that’s not a turn of phrase; we see him drop from his mother as she pauses from her work at an outdoor fish market), and follow him through his childhood and years in the tannery. This is the most brutal portion of the film, though lightened by the semi-comic deaths of everyone Grenouille touches. If you can’t find death funny, this film isn’t for you. It’s easy to sympathize with him during this segment. The world is horrible, as are the people in it. He is only odd. It makes his first murder easy to excuse, although I would have preferred him to be even stranger, to make it clear that he has no understanding of society’s morals. John Hurt (Nineteen Eighty-Four, Frankenstein Unbound) narrates as if this is an epic religious work, or possibly Lemony Snicket. It is effective in characterizing Grenouille, but it also feels like a cheat. It’s easy to adapt a book for the screen if you are just going to read it. But Hurt is silenced after twenty minutes, and is only heard briefly on two latter occasions.
Grenouille learns the secrets of the perfumer’s arts from Dustin Hoffman, who thinks he’s in a French farce while everyone else is certain he’s in Hamlet. It is the only case of miss-casting. The switch in perspective (we’re now seeing things through the perfumer’s eyes) makes Grenouille a harder character to cuddle up next to. That isn’t necessarily a problem, as most people prefer not to cheer on murderers, but it is a jolt in storytelling.
After some introspective time in the mountains, Grenouille enters the city of Grasse, and the movie the trailers promise begins. The pace increases three times over, and the character study is dropped in favor of action, horror, twisted comedy, and social commentary. We’re introduced to the first sympathetic characters, which makes Grenouille finally appear as an unequivocal villain.
The movie changes gears once more, with a climax that only those who have read the book will expect. It is this ending that will spark those water cooler debates, and gives the movie a much deeper core.
Yes, it is all good, and none of it fits together. What’s here is four or five movies, a few of them excellent, and the others worthwhile. But it doesn’t pull into a whole. I suspect viewers will either like the portrait of a serial killer stuff, and wonder why the story went out of kilter at the end, or enjoy the magical-realism segment, and shake their head at the over-long character development. I belong to the second camp. Without a down-to-earth wrap-up of the case study material, Grenouille isn’t an interesting enough killer, nor are we given enough access to his feelings, to warrant so much time with so little plot. But the last twenty minutes will stick with you, for good or ill, for a long time, and I’d have liked to get to it sooner, or at least have everything that came before it be relevant.
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer will get under your skin, the way art is supposed to. The sets, locations, and music are flawless and several actors, including Ben Whishaw, Alan Rickman, and Rachel Hurd-Wood should have their names mentioned when awards’ time rolls around. But it is also unsatisfying. It should have been great, but settles for fascinating.