Cold. I feel cold and I want to relish in different aromas, regardless of the source.
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a movie based on a 1985 novel of the same name. The likes of Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorcese have said that the book was unadaptable to film; until Tom Tykwer came along.
The story revolves around Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a peasant gifted with the keenest sense of smell that can dissect and analyze any aroma fed to him. “Scent is the very essence of a human,” he declares near the beginning of the film, and his inexplicable lack of a personal scent has him trying to find the perfect scent, and preserving it.
The visually appealing 18th century setting evokes the feeling of almost-smelling the movie. (Too bad smell-o-vision hasn’t materialized yet.) Grenouille is an amoral obsessionist — his desire to capture scents has him trying to distill the scent of cats, copper, glass and desirable females. He succeeds, and that’s when the movie takes off, the murders and distillation of his victim’s scents to create the perfect aroma.
The movie doesn’t even acknowledge the extent of how cold his means are to acquire the scent, “wrong,” as a concept, doesn’t exist in the protagonist’s dictionary, and so should the entire film. And that fact doubles the sheer horror of the acts committed, and how impersonal the protagonist is, making for a creepy overall feeling after the credits appear.
It’s a very engaging film, (given that I can’t feel sympathy towards the protagonist himself) until the very end, that is, when the film suddenly starts to veer towards the preposterous, along with a scene involving mass orgasmo. (Although this maybe the ‘artsy’ part of the film, so maybe I just didn’t get it? I know I didn’t like it that much though.)
See it if you feel like it, or if deplorable/disgusting acts turn you on.
4/5
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