The Perfume(2009)

By rajat on 4:59 AM

Filed Under: movie

Adapted from Patrick Süskind’s clammy, high-toned international best seller, “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” is of interest mainly as an example of what might be called the sensory imperialism of cinema. Quite a few movies, not content to stimulate the eyes and ears, try to conquer the other senses as well. Touch and taste are the favorites — hence the ubiquity of scenes that take place in bed or at a table — but an intrepid researcher could probably identify, amid the sighing caresses and laden forkfuls, an authentically olfactory film tradition. The touchstone might be John Waters’s divinely vulgar “Polyester,” filmed in “Odorama” and originally released in 1981 with a scratch-and-sniff strip that was handed out to theater patrons to provide a smell track.

Tom Tykwer, the director of “Perfume” (and also, most memorably, of “Run Lola Run”) asks to be taken much more seriously than Mr. Waters ever has, which has the unfortunate, predictable effect of making his new movie all the more ridiculous. It tells the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw), a skinny, sallow young fellow who grows up in the pungent atmosphere of 18th-century France burdened with a preternaturally sensitive nose. Every stone and blade of grass, every young woman’s cheekbone and belly button, every piece of fruit and hunk of rotting fish sends its essence straight to Grenouille’s nostrils, sometimes from a great distance.

Whereas Mr. Süskind portrayed this condition in ripe, sarcastic prose, Mr. Tykwer’s method is one of stupefying literalism. Exploiting the lush, lurid tones of Frank Griebe’s cinematography, he rubs our noses in Grenouille’s world by assaulting our eyes with what he smells. Thus the camera lingers on rotting fish, on animal skins at the tannery where Grenouille serves an early apprenticeship, and then on the lissome ladies who become his victims. But the only smell produced by these long, breathy close-ups is a metaphorical one, a foul, stale odor traceable back to the movie itself.

Grenouille’s episodic, unsavory adventures are propelled along by John Hurt’s arch, third-person narration. (Mr. Hurt has performed a similar service for another over-reaching European filmmaker, Lars von Trier, in his English-language campus theatricals, “Dogville” and “Manderlay.”) Mr. Whishaw, wan and jug-eared, does not quite manage to make Grenouille either a victim worthy of pity or a fascinating monster. The fellow’s sensory endowment is meant to make him both an artist and an amoral killer — a social outcast who nonetheless gives the society what it really wants — but in the film he comes across as dull, dour and repellent.
Odorless himself — in the unwashed streets of Paris and the fragrant lanes of Grasse, France’s perfume capital, this condition is a kind of invisibility — Grenouille is consumed with the project of concocting a transcendental scent. After receiving some technical training from a master perfume-maker named Baldini (Dustin Hoffman), he sets out to perfect his own special formula, a recipe that calls for the extracted essences of 12 virgins and a prostitute, who all must be killed before the materials can be rendered. The women are thus bonked on the head, covered in animal fat and then left, naked and carefully posed, like subjects in a Helmut Newton magazine spread, in the streets and squares of Grasse.

The town authorities panic, in particular Antoine Richis (Alan Rickman), a local notable whose red-haired daughter, Laura (Rachel Hurd-Wood), conveniently possesses a natural funk that is one of Grenouille’s coveted ingredients. So intent is he on finding her that he pursues her over hill and dale, using his powerful nose to track her as she flees. The camera dutifully speeds across the countryside, and when it lights upon Laura, who is fleeing in disguise and on horseback, she turns around in the saddle, as if suddenly aware that she is being sniffed.
Try as it might to be refined and provocative, “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” never rises above the pedestrian creepiness of its conceit. A connection between sexual desire and the impulse to kill — that tried and true German Liebestod — is proposed but never really explored. When Mr. Hoffman (who looks marvelous in velvety face powder) departs the scene, he takes any inkling of camp or whimsy with him, leaving behind an atmosphere that becomes increasingly arid even as it strains toward sensory saturation.

Grenouille’s grand, amoral project culminates in a ludicrously overdone scene of orgiastic abandon. Given the period costumes and the squirming alacrity with which they are removed, I’m tempted to think of it as “Fellini’s Shortbus,” but this suggests a commitment to pleasure, as subject and outcome, that “Perfume” wholly lacks.

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