This Week in Cinema (01.08.07)
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
By Beth Capper
Published: January 10th, 2007 | 4:52pm
For a long time, Patrick Suskind’s best-selling novel, Perfume, has been considered too complex to adapt for the cinema, its brilliance coming more from its poetic subtleties than from the twists and turns of its plot. Director Tom Tykwer, however, has decided to have a go anyway.
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer opens in the slums of 18th-century Paris at the birth of our protagonist Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. Grenouille is born with a unique sense of smell and as he grows older, capturing scent becomes one of the driving forces behind his existence. He quickly finds himself a protégé of the aging perfumier Baldini whose popularity with the public has been waning for some time. Grenouille agrees to assist Baldini in making his business thrive again if Baldini will, in turn, teach him how to capture scent. Baldini teaches Grenouille that each perfume is made up of twelve vital scents, as well as a thirteenth key scent that supposedly makes the perfume especially superior. Baldini’s methods, however, aren’t enough to capture every scent Grenouille hopes to, so he travels to Grasse in the South to learn from the very best perfumieres in France.
What Grenouille wants to capture more than anything is the scent of young and beautiful virginal girls, a fact that, unfortunately, means he has to kill them. And since Grenouille requires thirteen scents for his perfume, he also needs 13 girls. As Grenouille goes about gathering his scents, leaving his dead victims with their hair shorn off in various locations throughout Grasse, he begins to attract suspicion.
Tykwer’s adaptation, though ambitious, is poorly executed, and by the film’s conclusion, the novel’s narrative subtleties catch up with the cinematic plot. Ben Whishaw, who plays the scrawny Grenouille, as well as Dustin Hoffman in the role of Baldini, both offer weak performances. While Suskind’s original novel was a work of English language fiction, the film, especially in its narration, would have benefited from a French language script, making the settings and characters more believable. This wouldn’t have been such a stretch for Tykwer, either, as the German filmmaker had previously worked in French for Paris’ Je t’aime.
Overall, Perfume proves to be an adequate reminder that some stories just shouldn’t be cinematized.
Issue #35
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