Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006)
Country: GER/FR/SP/US
Technical: col/2.35:1 147m
Director: Tom Tykwer
Cast: Ben Whishaw, Alan Rickman, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Dustin Hoffman
Synopsis:
In eighteenth century France a boy is born with a uniquely potent olfactory sense. He makes it his life's work to classify all the smells around him and to preserve them, particularly that associated with a girl he unwittingly killed having followed her scent through the streets of Paris. What he ultimately achieves is the creation of a thirteen-note perfume so evocative it inspires adoration and loss of self-possession in the beholder, while leaving himself strangely unmoved.
Review:
Süskind's extraordinary source novel has two themes running concurrent, one the old axiom, that it profits a man nothing if he should inherit the world and yet forfeit his soul, and two, that like some Promethean figure Grenouille finds the secret of preserving life/experience in its most redolent form, and yet ultimately because he is in fact attempting to recreate the memory of his 'first love', he fails, for he is no longer able to enjoy or inspire love. These are handsomely illustrated by Tykwer, and nicely enunciated by the at times intrusive John Hurt narration, but one is left wondering what exactly a film brings to this subject, not to say regretting what is lost, as endlessly repeated shots of the actor's flared nostrils remind us that we are unable to share in his olfactory experiences, even at one remove. The above reservations aside, and with them the inexplicably redundant presence of Rickman as a bereaved father, the producers actually do as decent a job as could be conceived in the circumstances, although the screenplay scores best in the parfumerie of Hoffman's Baldini, rather than in the protracted collection of cadavers in Grasse. There is something anticlimactic in the protagonist's psychosis, since it renders superfluous his one extraordinary gift: to be able to discern the myriad odours of nature and assemble them in due proportion.
Country: GER/FR/SP/US
Technical: col/2.35:1 147m
Director: Tom Tykwer
Cast: Ben Whishaw, Alan Rickman, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Dustin Hoffman
Synopsis:
In eighteenth century France a boy is born with a uniquely potent olfactory sense. He makes it his life's work to classify all the smells around him and to preserve them, particularly that associated with a girl he unwittingly killed having followed her scent through the streets of Paris. What he ultimately achieves is the creation of a thirteen-note perfume so evocative it inspires adoration and loss of self-possession in the beholder, while leaving himself strangely unmoved.
Review:
Süskind's extraordinary source novel has two themes running concurrent, one the old axiom, that it profits a man nothing if he should inherit the world and yet forfeit his soul, and two, that like some Promethean figure Grenouille finds the secret of preserving life/experience in its most redolent form, and yet ultimately because he is in fact attempting to recreate the memory of his 'first love', he fails, for he is no longer able to enjoy or inspire love. These are handsomely illustrated by Tykwer, and nicely enunciated by the at times intrusive John Hurt narration, but one is left wondering what exactly a film brings to this subject, not to say regretting what is lost, as endlessly repeated shots of the actor's flared nostrils remind us that we are unable to share in his olfactory experiences, even at one remove. The above reservations aside, and with them the inexplicably redundant presence of Rickman as a bereaved father, the producers actually do as decent a job as could be conceived in the circumstances, although the screenplay scores best in the parfumerie of Hoffman's Baldini, rather than in the protracted collection of cadavers in Grasse. There is something anticlimactic in the protagonist's psychosis, since it renders superfluous his one extraordinary gift: to be able to discern the myriad odours of nature and assemble them in due proportion.
Country: GER/FR/SP/US
Technical: col/2.35:1 147m
Director: Tom Tykwer
Cast: Ben Whishaw, Alan Rickman, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Dustin Hoffman
Synopsis:
In eighteenth century France a boy is born with a uniquely potent olfactory sense. He makes it his life's work to classify all the smells around him and to preserve them, particularly that associated with a girl he unwittingly killed having followed her scent through the streets of Paris. What he ultimately achieves is the creation of a thirteen-note perfume so evocative it inspires adoration and loss of self-possession in the beholder, while leaving himself strangely unmoved.
Review:
Süskind's extraordinary source novel has two themes running concurrent, one the old axiom, that it profits a man nothing if he should inherit the world and yet forfeit his soul, and two, that like some Promethean figure Grenouille finds the secret of preserving life/experience in its most redolent form, and yet ultimately because he is in fact attempting to recreate the memory of his 'first love', he fails, for he is no longer able to enjoy or inspire love. These are handsomely illustrated by Tykwer, and nicely enunciated by the at times intrusive John Hurt narration, but one is left wondering what exactly a film brings to this subject, not to say regretting what is lost, as endlessly repeated shots of the actor's flared nostrils remind us that we are unable to share in his olfactory experiences, even at one remove. The above reservations aside, and with them the inexplicably redundant presence of Rickman as a bereaved father, the producers actually do as decent a job as could be conceived in the circumstances, although the screenplay scores best in the parfumerie of Hoffman's Baldini, rather than in the protracted collection of cadavers in Grasse. There is something anticlimactic in the protagonist's psychosis, since it renders superfluous his one extraordinary gift: to be able to discern the myriad odours of nature and assemble them in due proportion.