Since its publication in 1985, the Bavarian novelist Patrick Suskind's bestselling Das Parfum has been considered unfilmable by both its author (who refused for a decade to sell the screen rights) as well as various screenwriters and directors who've contemplated adapting it. You could easily advertise a film about smells ('More Pungent than Bronowski's A Scent of Man', 'More Fragrant than Mary Archer'), but how could you make one? There have been a couple of attempts. Mike Todd Jr's thriller Scent of Mystery (1960) was a serious shot, using the Smell-O-Vision process (nicknamed 'Todd-BO') to pump out rapidly dispersing odours into the auditorium (for example, a smell of cigar-smoke to announce the approach of the villain). But it was technically complicated; the auditorium had to be hermetically sealed, smells lingered, and people with colds were just bored by a lousy film.
- Perfume -The Story of a Murderer
- Production year: 2006
- Country: Rest of the world
- Cert (UK): 15
- Runtime: 147 mins
- Directors: Tom Tykwer
- Cast: Alan Rickman, Ben Whishaw, Dustin Hoffman, Rachel Hurd-Wood
Few people saw it, and even fewer saw the documentary Behind the Great Wall, made in China and shown in Aromarama. The skittish Odorama, a one-off joke starring the 20-stone transvestite Divine, came 25 years later. The audience for John Waters's calculated trashy Polyester were given cards with 10 numbered pink discs to scratch when the appropriate number flashed on the screen. The odours ranged from sickly sweet (flowers) to nauseatingly foul (smelly feet and farts), and added a new dimension to bad taste.
No such gimmick has been essayed in Perfume, a pretty faithful adaptation of Suskind's novel by Andrew Birkin, Bernd Eichinger and director Tom Tykwer. Viewers are invited to exercise their nasal imaginations, with assistance from an elegant commentary beautifully delivered by John Hurt, who begins by telling us that the film is set in the most noisome area of the smelliest city of malodorous 18th-century France. The anti-hero Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw) is born to a Paris fishwife while she's working at her stall. After she's been executed on the false charge of attempted infanticide he's put into an orphanage that makes Oliver Twist's workhouse look like a juvenile Club Med, and then sold to a grotesque tannery. Along the way he becomes aware of having amazing powers of smell. Indeed he is to odours what the hero of Funes, The Memorious is to memory, and I would guess Suskind was probably inspired by that classic Jorge Luis Borges fable.
Jean-Baptiste's interest in scents leads to him stalking and accidentally killing a beautiful red-headed street-vendor, the smell of whose body enchants him. Her death affects him only to the extent of turning his fascination into an obsession, and he becomes the assistant to a once fashionable Italian performer, Baldini (a delightfully pawky performance from Dustin Hoffman), whose business he rejuvenates. But to pursue his project of capturing the essence of a beautiful woman's odour, he heads for Grasse in Provence to conduct experiments as an employee of a fragrance factory (or should that be an olfactory?). Unfortunately his activities involve murdering a succession of beautiful girls (some 20 or so) and abandoning their naked but unravished bodies in the surrounding countryside, thus creating panic in the Midi. The term serial killer was not known 240 years ago, and was just becoming current when Suskind wrote his novel.
Perfume is a heartless, detached black comedy, a snuff movie posing as a sniff movie, that like Alain Corneau's Tous les matins du monde and Patrice Leconte's Ridicule uses the costume movie to explore ideas, philosophical dilemmas and creative matters. The movie is an intelligent, engaging affair. But it falls off rather badly towards the end when Jean-Baptiste's powers become almost supernatural, inducing a public orgy among the people of Grasse that is embarrassing without being funny, shocking or metaphysically transcendent.