Culture from the darker side

Perfume is based on the novel of the same name by Patrick Süskind.

The story revolves around a strange young man born in 18th Century Paris, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, whose prodigious gift of an incomparable sense of smell and inexplicable lack of a personal scent isolates him from society. Obsessed with the rich sensory world he alone inhabits, his single objective in life becomes the preservation of the perfect scent: the skin of young, beautiful virgins.

The challenge for the movie clearly was how to show scent in a visual medium, which by itself does not possess any scent. According to several sources it seems many directors didn’t believe it could be done, but Tom Tykwker (of Run Lola Run fame) took on the task and….. succeeded.

The movie is long, almost 2 1/2 hours, but one can sympathize, both with the victims and the murderer, with the victims because they do not deserve to die, and with Grenouille, because he is driven by something that he perceives as larger than him. He initially doesn’t try to kill them, but his attempts to save the essence off of a living woman (a prostitute) fails as she considers him weird, so he kills her, and then choses it as the easier / only way to accomplish his goal.

The movie has no winners, everybody loses, even side characters die once they have met him…..

The movie is cruel, but not obviously so, it isn’t crude.

The women are beautiful, though more in a 21st century kind of way, not in a 18th century France kind of way.

I now want to read the book:

5/5

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