European Films

(This review contains minor spoilers for those who have not read the book. However, with a title this explicit, it could be safe to read the review anyway -- just skip the one-but-last paragraph.)

Flat out the most exciting cinematic adaptation of a novel since Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tom Tykwer's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer transposes Patrick Süskind's dark fable to the big screen with verve and vigour, condensing what Stanley Kubrick considered an unfilmable novel into a two-hour-plus on-screen spectacle of epic proportions that is also surprisingly resonant. Tykwer's sane decision to prefer traditional craftsmanship over computer-generated imagery and a highly intelligent screenplay that hews very close to the spirit of the novel put Perfume way ahead of its competitors, though the amount of female nudity and the story's amoral undercurrents may prove difficult for those looking for innocent entertainment. Fans of the book and lovers of dark fables in historical settings, however, can't go wrong with this all but evanescent delight, which is likely to become a solid autumn success across the continent. Selling the film in other parts of the world may be more problematic.

Still most famous for his kinetic low-budget wonder Lola rennt (Run, Lola, Run), German director Tom Tykwer here works with an estimated €50 million budget that he puts to full use, though thankfully the use of CGI is confined to the Parisian street on which aging Italian perfumer Baldini (Dustin Hoffman, the impresario in Finding Neverland) lives, and one ill-advised sequence in which Baldini becomes so entranced by the first olfactory creation of his soon-to-be assistant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw, from Layer Cake) that he thinks himself in a flowery paradise.

These scenes do nothing but underline the accomplishment of Tykwer in the rest of the film, however: since the sense of smell cannot be conveyed on the big screen, the director focuses on heightening the senses that can be assaulted: the eyes and ears. Cinematographer Frank Griebe (who has worked with Tykwer on all his features) niftily uses lingering close-ups that abandon deep focus to eliminate all the unnecessary background noise when the sensation of smell is front and centre, while Stefan Busch and Frank Kruse's sound design do a similar thing whenever Grenouille is chasing a whiff of something delicate. The film's lush score, written by Tykwer and his friends of Pale 3, is equally important in creating atmosphere. The combination of these elements easily substitute the words that described all the different olfactory sensations in the novel, something which might have seemed impossible but which both Süskind and Tykwer have understood is what makes this story so special and therefore merits special attention.

The Parisian-born orphan Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (his name means "frog" in French, an in-joke to which Tykwer pays homage in an early scene in which Grenouille as a child smells tadpoles in a yonder pond) is aware from an early age that he has a heightened sense of smell. Growing up in an orphanage before being sold to a tanner as a manual labourer, he absorbs all the scents he can and catalogues them in his brain without even knowing the names of most odours. This will change when he meets Baldini, an over-the-hill perfumer whose house is stacked to the rafters with the most exotic ingredients and who hires him after a demonstration of his absolute sense of smell. (Production designer Uli Hanisch fills every frame of the film with details too numerous to count, which gives the impression Grenouille was constantly assaulted by all sorts of smells.)

Having accidentally come upon the exquisite natural scent of a virginal, red-headed plum girl (Karoline Herfurth) and after accidentally killing her, Grenouille becomes obsessed with the idea of distilling the smell of young virgins to create his own, 13-note perfume. The scrawny apprentice soon asks Baldini to teach him how to distill and conserve the scents of any object whatsoever, so that he can secretly work on his dream project. Tykwer and co-screenwriters Bernd Eichinger (Der Untergang/Downfall) and Andrew Birkin (The Name of the Rose) condense much of the story here but do so with several inventions that were not or only marginally part of the novel but excellently convey the larger ruminations of Süskind's original (the 13-note perfume is one such invention).

After a meditative pit-stop in the mountains, the action moves to the paradise of perfumers called Grasse in the South of France for the second half of the story, where Grenouille will learn the technique that will enable him to complete his project: enfleurage. Though separate from the first half set in Paris, the film is again about Grenouille outwitting an older opponent: in this case the rich Mr Richis (Alan Rickman, Snape from the Harry Potter series) the father of Laure (Rachel Hurd-Wood, Wendy from 2003's Peter Pan), a red-headed virgin who could be the crown 13th note of Grenouille's perfume. The Baldini and Richis characters seem to mirror each other even stronger in the film than they did in the novel, especially because Dustin Hoffman's performance is like an eerie, faux-Italian-inflected channelling of the work of his colleague Mr Rickman (the two characters never actually meet in the film).

The inhabitants of Grasse soon become haunted by a series of murders of beautiful young girls, while Grenouille steady works on collecting the notes needed for his ultimate perfume. Though the story, as the title indicates, centres on a murderer, Tykwer and Whishaw know how to balance what their amoral protagonist wants with what the audience needs to remain involved in the story. Whishaw is a revelation in a very difficult role that is mostly mute and certainly ugly. His slight, lanky body seems to suggest he was an extra in Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride, and his eyes are ablaze with an unnatural intensity that is perfectly suited to the one obsessive quest that Grenouille feels he has to fulfill. The film even keeps the novel's downbeat ending and numerous references to its preordained universe that make up much of the story's more literary pleasures.  

Tykwer's approach to the book's finale, the most important and crowded scene in which numerous people are shown in various states of undress, is conspicuously European in that it is neither too prude nor too vulgar and conveys just what is needed. Again, Tykwer seems to have relied on actual people populating the scene rather than copying a small group of extras by means of computers, which gives the film a wide canvas against which to play that feels real. In a slight departure from the novel that works very well, the film actually starts with the build-up to this scene, before a narrator (John Hurt, who also narrated Dogville and Manderlay) takes us back to Grenouille's birth and fills in much of the backstory in an opening section that runs too long and relies too heavily on the text rather than the imagery and mise-en-scene to tell the story. Despite these small hiccoughs, however, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is about as good as films can get, certainly this year and -- time will tell -- perhaps this decade.

Boyd van Hoeij named Perfume: The Story of a Murder one of the ten Best Films of 2006.

Buy the film on DVD at: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.fr, amazon.de, internetbookshop.it, dvdGO.es.

The original Patrick Süskind novel on amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.fr and on amazon.de.