Summary:
A perfumer with an incredible sense of smell has a deadly obsession with his pursuit of trying capture the scent of women.
My Thoughts:
I feel like after you watch movies for a while, you start to figure out what sort of movies are up your alley, and sometimes you’ve just got to say damn the critics and check out a film because it sounds interesting. This film was one that I had seen recommended in a few Facebook film groups, usually with the context being ‘This is a weird movie, has anyone else seen it?’ I like weird movies, probably more so than the average bear, and if any movie gets recommended multiple times, I’ll usually go out of my way to see what the film is about. When I read the summary, and saw the supporting cast, I thought to myself, “Yep, that sure sounds weird. I’ll watch that.”
The plot deals with a man whom has an incredible sense of smell, and after smelling a certain woman, this man tries to capture her smell, but she dies in the process. Intent on discovering how to preserve the scent of a woman, the man becomes a perfumer and develops his own methods of preserving smells. It becomes his goal to collect the scents of the best smelling woman, and in the process he becomes a serial killer.
A two-and-a-half hour, slightly-kinky period piece about a serial killer co-starring Dustin Hoffman (“Straw Dogs”) and Alan Rickman (“Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”)? Yeah, I’m down. Freaking sign me up.
“I take joy in my work.”
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Winshaw, “Skyfall”) is a man with an incredible sense of smell. After encountering a woman with an intoxicating scent, he kills her, and tries to preserve her scent, but fails. Jean-Baptiste goes to renowned perfumer Giuseppe Baldini (Hoffman) to learn the ways of his trade. After learning all that he can, Jean-Baptiste begins work on his masterpiece: capturing scents of the most beautiful women.
There’s a lot to like about this movie. For one thing, the director, Tom Tykwer, knows one what he’s doing in terms of crafting a scene (if you haven’t seen “Run Lola Run” I highly recommend that, and I am of the opinion that “Cloud Atlas” is one of the most underrated movies of the decade). This movie is all about smells and the intoxicating effect of certain senses, and since this film doesn’t come with a scratch-and-sniff card, Tykwer has to use imagery to make the viewer feel as if there are smelling things, as if they really are there with Jean-Baptiste, smelling what he smells, and in so many scenes Tykwer succeeds. I think of Jean-Baptiste’s turning point, where he kills his first victim; that scene comes out of nowhere. Jean-Batiste smells this girl in a crowd, and it’s as if his whole world goes fuzzy and is turned upside down; we’re shown flashes of lemons and other citrusy fruits as Jean-Baptiste stalks through a crowd; the wind blows, he inhales, and it’s almost as if we, the viewer, are there with him, smelling the scent he smells.
There are a few scenes that happen like this, where we are experiencing the moment as Jean-Baptiste experiences them. Like, for example, the scenes when he finally starts to figure out how to capture the smell using a kind of animal fat. The process involves rubbing this fat all over the naked bodies of his victims, but though the act and the way that it is portrayed is rather sensual, we also understand that Jean-Baptiste doesn’t necessarily take pleasure in touching the corpses; he takes pleasure in the smell that they omit. Yes, it is weird and slightly kinky, but hey, it’s also executed pretty well; if a director can make me get inside the head of a serial killer, he’s doing his job.
I thought the production design in this film was pretty impressive. In general, I enjoy period pieces, but period pieces with lower to middling budgets can often suffer in the production design aspect, because it’s difficult to replicate period-accurate clothing, set dressing, what have you. This film looked pretty darn good; there were a few sets that were pretty large scale (entire streets or courtyards), and others which were smaller that were simply crammed with interesting details (Jean-Baptiste’s workshop).
The acting was pretty good all around. Both Hoffman and Rickman were fine in their supporting roles, though I believe Hoffman was a bit more interesting of a character. Ben Winshaw was good too. I think this was the first time I’ve ever really seen him in a leading role, but he certainly commanded enough screen presence that I wouldn’t be surprised to see him in the protagonist role again.
My biggest qualms with this film were the ending and the length, and if I’m being honest, I didn’t even feel the length until the ending started to get all schmaltzy on me. I suppose here I better throw up a big SPOILER tag.
The ending of this film shows Jean-Baptiste captured and put on trial, but right before he’s about to be executed, he uses a bit of the perfume he concocted from the combined distilled scents of many woman, and suddenly the bishop presiding over the case calls off the execution, saying that Jean-Baptiste is an angel. Um. What? The narrator goes on to talk about how Jean-Baptiste has created a perfume so beautiful that it influences people to do whatever he wants, and he simply gets away with the murders. Eventually though, he grows tired of this, concocts a new perfume that is too powerful, puts it on, and people tear him apart in the street. The ending is just sort of weird; it doesn’t do anything for me at all. For one thing, the ‘magical properties’ of scent were never really established before the end. And for another thing, there’s no character resolution: Jean-Baptiste doesn’t have to pay for his crimes, he just sort of gets bored and offs himself. I honestly enjoyed this film up until that finale, and then I sort of wished the film had been a half an hour shorter because it certainly didn’t earn its length.
Verdict:
Despite the fact that this film sort of fumbled the ending, I still sort of liked it. The direction is pretty refined, the acting is commendable, the production design is great, and the story is bizarre and compelling. Sometimes you just need a film to show you something new, and “Perfume”, while it isn’t completely flawless, is undeniably unique.
End Note: If you liked this movie, I also recommend “The Limehouse Golem”.
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