Chris Knipp
12-27-2006, 10:37 PM
Tom Tykwer: Perfume, the Story of a Murderer (2006)
Scent of a woman
Review by Chris Knipp
W A R N I N G --- S P O I L E R S
Perfume is a fable – or, if you like, a fabulous tale. Its beauty is the way it explores a single subject, a single talent, a single obsession, much like Jorge Luis Borges' Funes the Memorious – the story of another marvelous boy, one who could never forget anything he had ever seen or experienced. Such a character, without normal perception or relationship to the world, burdened by his exceptional ability, is outside conventional morality, and Patrick Süskind's eponymous novel, which Tom Tykver has adeptly reconstructed as a film, is also an exploration of good and evil. The central figure of Perfume, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is extraordinary in one way – his sense of smell – only through being narrow or underdeveloped in all other ways. In the striking performance of the talented young English actor Ben Whishaw, Grenouille is a feral youth, unique in matters olfactory and in that sense intensely sensual, but in other ways a blank, impressive only for his dedication to exploring his talent, slow at communication, drawn to young women but only for their scent. He’s apparently without normal desire or at least without the ability to consummate it. He’s an obsessive pure and simple, rendered selfless and ascetic by his compulsive focus, as a saint is purified by being obsessed with God.
Grenouille’s obsession keeps him from growing up. His desire to possess young virgins by bottling their scent becomes an ability to distill purity and goodness so that after committing a series of murders of beautiful young girls, he is ultimately forgiven by a mass of people, and the executioner drops down to worship him as an angel.
Perfume embodies an adolescent boy’s perception of girls. He doesn’t know how to deal with them in a grown-up way. Its hero likes the young women he finds, indeed he adores them, but he is afraid of them. Why does he murder them? Perhaps because he’s just too shy to persuade them to let him distill their odor by his methods. And, terrified of possessing them physically, he wants to bottle their essence – a form in which they will be safe. Perfume essence of the finest and most special kind as pursued by the hero of this story paradoxically becomes a kind of quintessence, and hence not so much the ultimate sensuous experience as it is a refinement of being beyond sense. Grenouille’s story of becoming a genius and the greatest perfumier of all time is an adolescent fantasy of excelling over all others in something hitherto unthought of. It is a limited tale – as is Borges' of "Funes" (which was only a few pages but is nonetheless imperishable for that) – but Tykver has presented it beautifully, without overdrawing anything and without false notes. Because of the limitations of its hero, it lacks emotional engagement, but it is engaging in other ways, because it is original and fresh.
This movie, which seems to have been well received in Tykver and Süskind's homeland of Germany and in other parts of Europe, is not being reviewed sympathetically by a majority of English and American critics. They say that the film is humorless and silly but not funny. If you take the story as realistic, it is patently absurd; but why would you do that? It is plainly a fable about quests for essences. One reviewer suggested the novel is sarcastic and the film relatively too solemn. This is odd in view of the fact that the novel is very violent (violence isn’t a joke). References to John Waters’ "Odorama" seem utterly beyond the point. The need is not to make us smell anything but to imagine a person who could smell everything and whose perceptions are completely beyond us. When Grenouille first enters Baldini’s workshop and runs around grabbing bottles of essential oils to make up a perfume, and he knows where they all are merely by the scent of them, it’s a compelling moment of perceived otherness. Despite its baroque flourishes, the movie has links with Robert Bresson. Grenouille is doomed like Bresson’s victim-saints and chilling and admirable in the same way. Even if it's hard to relate to Perfume emotionally, it is interesting for what it has to tell us.
And Tykver provides a very watchable movie whose images depart from the conventional costume drama in their use of physical detail. The screen is full of vivid mess and blood and dirt and vermin and slops from the first frames. Whishaw himself, almost constantly on camera, provides plenty to watch. He is scrawny, with a scary innocence, like the young Anthony Perkins (but more sensual). Half naked and slavered over with dirt in almost every scene, he is vulnerable yet indomitable. Richly costumed crowds, buttoning and unbuttoning their clothes, shifting on and off their wigs, are in constant déshabille till the final divine orgy when they publicly disrobe. This is simply seen by our critics as absurd or embarrassing, "Fellini’s Shortbus" or some reincarnation of the Seventies, rather than as the working out of the ultimate implications of the fable.
But it all does have a comic side, as we see in Dustin Hoffman’s appealing turn as the out-of-fashion perfumier Baldini. The villainous overprotective father Antoine Richis is played by a frequently comic purveyor of meanness, Alan Rickman, And John Hurt’s familiar, formally perfect voiceover has acquired an ironic edge. No, this is not a failure or an embarrassment, and audiences are enjoying it.
Scent of a woman
Review by Chris Knipp
W A R N I N G --- S P O I L E R S
Perfume is a fable – or, if you like, a fabulous tale. Its beauty is the way it explores a single subject, a single talent, a single obsession, much like Jorge Luis Borges' Funes the Memorious – the story of another marvelous boy, one who could never forget anything he had ever seen or experienced. Such a character, without normal perception or relationship to the world, burdened by his exceptional ability, is outside conventional morality, and Patrick Süskind's eponymous novel, which Tom Tykver has adeptly reconstructed as a film, is also an exploration of good and evil. The central figure of Perfume, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is extraordinary in one way – his sense of smell – only through being narrow or underdeveloped in all other ways. In the striking performance of the talented young English actor Ben Whishaw, Grenouille is a feral youth, unique in matters olfactory and in that sense intensely sensual, but in other ways a blank, impressive only for his dedication to exploring his talent, slow at communication, drawn to young women but only for their scent. He’s apparently without normal desire or at least without the ability to consummate it. He’s an obsessive pure and simple, rendered selfless and ascetic by his compulsive focus, as a saint is purified by being obsessed with God.
Grenouille’s obsession keeps him from growing up. His desire to possess young virgins by bottling their scent becomes an ability to distill purity and goodness so that after committing a series of murders of beautiful young girls, he is ultimately forgiven by a mass of people, and the executioner drops down to worship him as an angel.
Perfume embodies an adolescent boy’s perception of girls. He doesn’t know how to deal with them in a grown-up way. Its hero likes the young women he finds, indeed he adores them, but he is afraid of them. Why does he murder them? Perhaps because he’s just too shy to persuade them to let him distill their odor by his methods. And, terrified of possessing them physically, he wants to bottle their essence – a form in which they will be safe. Perfume essence of the finest and most special kind as pursued by the hero of this story paradoxically becomes a kind of quintessence, and hence not so much the ultimate sensuous experience as it is a refinement of being beyond sense. Grenouille’s story of becoming a genius and the greatest perfumier of all time is an adolescent fantasy of excelling over all others in something hitherto unthought of. It is a limited tale – as is Borges' of "Funes" (which was only a few pages but is nonetheless imperishable for that) – but Tykver has presented it beautifully, without overdrawing anything and without false notes. Because of the limitations of its hero, it lacks emotional engagement, but it is engaging in other ways, because it is original and fresh.
This movie, which seems to have been well received in Tykver and Süskind's homeland of Germany and in other parts of Europe, is not being reviewed sympathetically by a majority of English and American critics. They say that the film is humorless and silly but not funny. If you take the story as realistic, it is patently absurd; but why would you do that? It is plainly a fable about quests for essences. One reviewer suggested the novel is sarcastic and the film relatively too solemn. This is odd in view of the fact that the novel is very violent (violence isn’t a joke). References to John Waters’ "Odorama" seem utterly beyond the point. The need is not to make us smell anything but to imagine a person who could smell everything and whose perceptions are completely beyond us. When Grenouille first enters Baldini’s workshop and runs around grabbing bottles of essential oils to make up a perfume, and he knows where they all are merely by the scent of them, it’s a compelling moment of perceived otherness. Despite its baroque flourishes, the movie has links with Robert Bresson. Grenouille is doomed like Bresson’s victim-saints and chilling and admirable in the same way. Even if it's hard to relate to Perfume emotionally, it is interesting for what it has to tell us.
And Tykver provides a very watchable movie whose images depart from the conventional costume drama in their use of physical detail. The screen is full of vivid mess and blood and dirt and vermin and slops from the first frames. Whishaw himself, almost constantly on camera, provides plenty to watch. He is scrawny, with a scary innocence, like the young Anthony Perkins (but more sensual). Half naked and slavered over with dirt in almost every scene, he is vulnerable yet indomitable. Richly costumed crowds, buttoning and unbuttoning their clothes, shifting on and off their wigs, are in constant déshabille till the final divine orgy when they publicly disrobe. This is simply seen by our critics as absurd or embarrassing, "Fellini’s Shortbus" or some reincarnation of the Seventies, rather than as the working out of the ultimate implications of the fable.
But it all does have a comic side, as we see in Dustin Hoffman’s appealing turn as the out-of-fashion perfumier Baldini. The villainous overprotective father Antoine Richis is played by a frequently comic purveyor of meanness, Alan Rickman, And John Hurt’s familiar, formally perfect voiceover has acquired an ironic edge. No, this is not a failure or an embarrassment, and audiences are enjoying it.