From the moment of Grenouille’s birth in a fish market, death followed him everywhere like a mystical destiny.
Grenouille was born with a sense of smell so vast, humanity lacked the language to describe all the aromatic nuances available to him. The movie then flashes back to see how these events came to be. His sentence is handed down in the form of a slow, torturous crucifixion. With voice-over by unseen narrator John Hurt, it begins with Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (the heretofore unknown Brit Ben Whishaw) in a dank prison with an irate mob outside ready to rend him to pieces. This is as lush and sensual as movies come.Īdapted from an international bestseller by reclusive Patrick Süskind, Perfume is a German-French-Spanish co-production shot in English.
Perfume still needs the audience’s imagination to contribute to the olfactory, but the provocative imagery invite us to do just this. Made for 50 million Euros (currently about $66 million US), the movie looks like it cost much, much more than that. The visual effects department allows Tykwer to open up the space so that he can capture massive 18th century landscapes, both urban and rural. Production designer Uli Hanisch simultaneously fashions the filthiest Parisian ghettos and the most exquisite perfume parlors. Cinematographer Frank Griebe’s high contrast photography is extremely sharp so that objects stand out vividly in bold primary colors. Tykwer is up to the task though using his usual filmmaking team. Making a movie about the sense of smell presents an enormous challenge since it has to be conveyed solely through two other senses – sight and sound. Unlike in that film where flash was for flash’s sake, the onslaught of Tykwer’s style here is totally bound in service to the story.
Perfume is a movie of superlatives in every way, which might not be surprising coming from the director of Run Lola Run. Imagine combining the ambition of Leos Carax, the audacity of Stanley Kubrick, the visual peak of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the epic imagination of Peter Jackson, and the perversity of Peter Greenaway into one movie and pulling it off in spades. The grand achievement of director Tom Tykwer however is to turn the ridiculous into monumental cinema. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a title as ridiculous as the premise of this movie: a man born in 18th century France has a sense of smell that would put a bloodhound to shame.
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