Perfume
stinks.
Well, maybe that subhead's a little too mean.
Perfume
doesn't stink so much as it just kinda smells disturbingly weird.
Perfume
is not an easy film to watch. The audience gets worked over pretty early with a gratuitous birthing scene in a filthy Dickensian London fish market that's
***image1***
guaranteed to turn
even the most ironclad stomach. Needless to say, the baby-who will grow up to be the protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw)-is destined to live a tough life.
At first, the story seems like it will follow the rags-to-riches arc: A boy born into poverty pulls himself up from the gutter to a place of prominence in society using his special qualities: He has an incredible nose that can pick up and differentiate between smells from miles away.
But he's also a psychotic killer. (We find this out when he follows a redhead into an alleyway for a sniff and ends up accidentally killing her.)
That's when things get interesting. Grenouille hooks up with effeminate perfumist Giuseppe Baldini (Dustin Hoffman), a suffering Salieri who's been losing business to some perfume genius Mozart. Grenouille shows up, takes a quick sniff of the competitor's perfume and shows Baldini how to make it even better.
Through his research, Grenouille eventually decides that attractive virgins contain the perfect ingredients for
***image2***
the super-perfume of his dreams. So, naturally, he goes on a killing spree to fill all 13 of his little bottles with eau de virgin.
For a while, it's predictable: He becomes a serial killer, and there's a very special young rich girl he covets for the final scent to finish his masterpiece. But what comes afterward is so off-the-wall that only the most unhinged would expect it. If you've read Patrick Süskind's bestselling novel, you'll marvel at how the filmmakers pulled it off. If you haven't, simply think of the most ridiculous, heavy-handed, misogynistic, over-the-top ending you can imagine, and you just might guess it.
One has to hand it to director Tom Tykwer's (
Run, Lola, Run
) chutzpah.
Perfume
is a film that toys with notions of right and wrong and asks the viewer to consider the possibility that maybe murdering a ton of people isn't such a bad thing. Ultimately, the weighty moral questions obscure the effective acting, the incredible logistics of filming a cast of thousands, and the phenomenal set design and cinematography that set the whole thing up. By the time it's over, a baffled, inescapable sense of "WTF?" may be the only thing you take away from it.
