Scent of a woman
A review requested by James, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is weird as hell right from the word "go". It's a movie set in Paris but the cast and general sense of slightly dull-eyed polish screams "English prestige picture", though no money came from the UK: it's more German than anything else, financially speaking, on top of being based on a German-language novel and directed by a German. But it's in English. And in case you could square all of that, Dustin Hoffman pokes up in the first half to try on an accent that isn't... anything, really, though I think he was trying to match his English co-stars.
And none of this gets us to the story itself, which is also weird, the kind of weird that had the book labeled as "unfilmable" for a large portion of the 21 years separating its publication from the premiere of the adaptation in 2006. Patrick Süskind, the author of 1985's Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Mörders, is said to have spend over a decade refusing to sell the rights unless the producers were willing to hire either Stanley Kubrick or Miloš Forman to direct it, and the rumor is that at least Kubrick was invited to take the job, but after contemplating it, he couldn't come up with a way to make it work. There are not many things that would make me less enthusiastic about attempting to film an "unfilmable" book than the knowledge, or even the mere suspicion, that Stanley Kubrick of all people in the history of the industry didn't think it could be done, but nonetheless, the project entered development in the early 2000s, eventually picking up Tom Tykwer to direct and work on the script that Andrew Birkin and Bernd Eichinger had been noodling with already. This was at the tail end of the period that Tykwer still seemed like a pretty cool filmmaker somewhere at least tolerably close to the cutting edge; the Run Lola Run glow hadn't quite faded yet. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer didn't do anything to burnish his reputation: the box office was strong, but reviews were mildly baffled and more of the "it's impressive that this wasn't a disaster" flavor than "this is a grand triumph". And it left him open for his next film, 2009's The International, to pretty much kill off his reputation as a major filmmaker; he made three films in the 2010s before decamping to television, and fairly or not, the only one that people still talk about, 2012's Cloud Atlas, mostly gets discussed in terms of Tykwer's co-directors, Lana and Lilly Wachowski.
If this was part of what sent Tykwer on his slow trip to director jail, it's not fair: Perfume probably isn't the film he meant for it to be, and I extremely much doubt it's the film that Süskind wanted it to be, but it's still a pretty incredible ride. Not always a smooth one. But there are not many movies that have replicated its mix of surface-level characteristics: the short version is that this pitched at just about the dead center of the triangle between stilted British period drama, porny exploitation flick, and narratively diffuse art film. Plus it's something of an absurdist dark comedy (the part that I'm not sure if Tykwer was doing on purpose, based on basically everything else I've ever seen that he was involved with) in how it treats some of its bleakest material, soggy blue-grey miserabilism that wallows in the gutter with such abandon, but also with such stylistic flourish, that I can't see any way around finding it kind of grimly hilarious in just how much it wants to impress upon us that 18th Century France was a grotesque hellhole of nonstop human suffering. It's all kind of confused and messy, but it is vivid: before re-watching it for this review, I saw the film one time, 17 years ago during its commercial theatrical release in the U.S., and it left a much more lasting impression on me from movies that came out around the same time that I would have said were "better", including some movies I've seen more than once. Though one of the things I couldn't remember about Perfume was whether or not I actually liked it, and having finally revisited it, I would actually say that feels just right. Being rattled by Perfume and finding it quite a singular, memorable experience but not really being able to confidently say that it was a good or bad experience does indeed feel like a very appropriate response to a movie that is much, much more nuts than it lets on.
The basics of the plot are simple enough: it's a serial killer thriller from the perspective of the killer, whose motivation is a very particular variation on the all-encompassing sexual obsession that's pretty much the solitary motivation that killers in movies ever have. Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw, in one of his early "putting this interesting-looking young actor on the map" roles) is a young man with only one character trait to speak of - I do not say "one personality trait", because I wouldn't say it's clear that he has a personality. What he has instead is a remarkably precise sense of smell, one that can break down the constituent elements of all odors into their smallest elements, while also having the acuity of a trained dog for smelling basically everything. And this would perhaps have left him as nothing but an odd social outcast, as he was at the orphanage growing up, if not for the fateful day when he became particularly entranced by the smell of a young redheaded woman (Karoline Herfurth), and, in his terrifyngly under-socialised way, he wandered after her so he could smell her more closely. The young woman very reasonably panics at this, and Grenouille's attempts to keep her quiet end up with her dead, a development that seems to affect the young man about as much as it affects a dog who discovers all of the delicious food in a garbage can for the first time: neat, probably shouldn't do that in front of people, wonder when I can do it again. From this point on, Grenouille's life is dedicated to becoming a perfumer, so he can learn all of the tricks of extracting scents from objects, and eventually he hopes to use this knowledge to craft a perfume that will remind him of the smell of that rapidly-cooling corpse. That this plan involves several more dead redheads does not seem to cause Grenouille either pleasure or concern. It does, however, make him the center of an increasingly frantic manhunt in the city of Grasse, where he has come to learn the secrets of essence distillation that could not be taught to him in Paris, where he studied the art of perfume-making under a certain Giueseppe Baldini (Hoffman).
I have never read Süskind's book, but my understanding from people who have is that the main challenge in adapting it is that it's written from the subjective viewpoint of a character whose outward behavior offers no hint that he possesses any kind of inner life, and whose actual inner life consists mostly of describing smells. If that was indeed the main problem Tykwer and company had to solve for, then I think we have to count Perfume: The Story of a Murderer as a failure of adaptation. Whishaw's performance, and to be 100% clear I think Whishaw is definitely not at fault in this case, consists largely of "don't have any affect": he's kind of a perfect distillation of a movie psychopath in that he's doing the wide-eyed owl-like staring of a Hannibal Lecter without the theatricality or a Norman Bates without the itchiness. He's giving us nothing, and it is, to be very fair, an active nothing, if that makes sense. His nothing-ness is alarming to look at, and not one time in the entire duration of Whishaw's performance do you get the feeling "this is a guy that I would be happy to have crossed paths with if I met him in real life". He's not not-acting; he's acting nothing, and that does take some doing. But it seems more like a bid to firmly situate Perfume in the genre of serial killer thriller, rather than to find any way to unlock complex material; also, frankly, I think that as far as the leading man goes, everybody involved was more concerned with how Whishaw looked than what he did, because most of the impact the character makes is through his gaunt, spindly frame and grimy skin. None of this, to be sure, is a problem if all we want is for Perfume to function at the level of a thriller, and I don't think that's a slightly invalid or disreputable goal. It's good to have good thrillers. I think Tom Tykwer probably wanted this to function at another level than that, and he didn't get there.
As for the other element of the challenge, the "make a movie about what things smell like", I don't see why that was a problem. There's nothing about the medium of prose that makes it more conducive to portraying smell than the medium of moving pictures. In the very same year that Perfume was theatrically released in most places outside of Europe, the animated film Ratatouille figured out a pretty excellent way to use color, the edges of shapes, and music to evoke a kind of cinematic synesthesia regarding how food tastes. And that was a mainstream Hollywood film for all-ages audiences. A European production with art film bona fides, should be able to do at least as much to evoke a non-audiovisual sensation through audiovisual means. That didn't turn out to be the case, and honestly, the filmmakers largely approached that problem by not trying. Pretty much the only strategy Tykwer ever employs to depict "Grenouille smells something" is to use quick, expressive cuts to insert shots of the things he's smelling, sometimes using tracking shots to evoke how he moves from smell to smell. Which is, I'm pretty sure, the absolute first idea anybody would ever have in tackling this problem, and which only ever really gets us as far as depicting smells in a strictly narrative context. What's missing is things like the moment where Grenouille crossly explains to Baldini that he can't find a way to distill the scent of glass, and Baldini is perplexed by the notion that glass even has a scent. That's an opportunity to do something for the viewer to take us out of the movie and visually render an essence of glassiness in a way that can at least suggest the alien forms inside the killer's mind, but Perfume generally doesn't even feint in that direction.
So much for what the movie isn't, and on to the much happier matter of what it is. As I've said, if Perfume: The Story of a Murderer mostly ignores everything prior to the colon in its title, what remains can still be a pretty rollicking story of a murderer, and I honestly do thing it manages. Whishaw's performance is more of a particularly austere, glacial, art-filmy movie monster than as a person, but he is also, crucially, a good movie monster. Having pondered the matter for both a little bit and also, more loosely, for 17 years, I think it's fair to say that Perfume works better as a sordid, morally impure exploitation thriller that throws its target audience for a loop by wearing all of the clothes of a stately middlebrow art picture than it does as a middlebrow art picture full of scenes of Whishaw rubbing wax or his nose all over naked women playing corpses, and it's a pity for the film that was manufactured and marketed in the opposite way of how it actually works. I mean, it definitely doesn't think that it's an exploitation film. If nothing else, anything that was even secretly targeting that audience would hopefully have been smart enough to avoid the 147-minute running time that is absolutely trying to force this into "serious European film for serious European filmgoers" mode.
Also, I frankly think that the fact that movie really doesn't want to be sordid and scuzzy is exactly what makes it so fucking weird. Grindhouse movies about kinky killers grabbing in close-up at the tits of very patient actresses playing dead are common enough, but very close to none of them set up permanent encampment in my brain the way Perfume has done, because none of them are wrong. I mean, you might want to argue that they're "wrong" in some kind of ethical sense, but they know what they're doing and why, and the audience knows that also. Perfume, to judge from every possible element of its production, isn't trying to be this kind of movie. Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman (who feels much more in his element than Hoffman) don't get cast in this kind of movie. I didn't really go into it up top, but if you watched any random slice of the movie where someone isn't dying and it's not the climactic sequence (which is also lost in the wasteland between "art film about sex" and "dirty movie for the raincoat brigade", though I do think it skews more toward the former), I don't think you would have a second thought that what you were watching was just another British period drama of a sort that were omnipresent in the 1990s and were still a pretty dominant fact of moviegoing life in the mid-'00s. Especially the elements about perfume making, which are objectively pretty fascinating to watch, and have that slice-of-life "we're watching a plotless movie about people doing things that are interesting and also don't typically show up in movies" energy that art cinema has thrived on since the '70s or earlier. Rickman's presence in the second half certainly enforces that feeling, though I think it would still feel odd that Hoffman is present.
Honestly, there's a sense in which the most inexplicable thing about Perfume: The Story of a Murderer isn't that it's lurid, but that it's German rather than British (though that perhaps goes some way towards explaining why it's also lurid). This has some intense "Film4 Productions" energy, and it seems very pointedly targeting nice bourgeois audiences with its concern with capturing the textures and costumes of 18th Century life in a way that's obviously more dramatic than documentarian, but still wants to be unobtrusively realistic. But it also opens with a sequence cut so swiftly that it's almost a montage of how a woman squeezes out a baby and tries to kill it in the filth-streaked streets of some shitty French town before she's summarily executed, and ends with SPOILERS an onscreen orgy and offscreen cannibalism. It's a mismatch that makes the grotty material feel even more disreputable, and makes the "we want Oscars" vibe of the production design and cinematography feel like some kind of sick joke. It feels too straightforward for most of its long length to really come across as the work of provocateurs, though I can't really think of another way to receive it; at any rate, it has a nasty heart, whether it meant to or not, and while I wouldn't exactly say it feels "dangerous" in the way it combines irreconcilable filmmaking modes, it's certainly striking to keep tripping over sleazy interludes in a place where you're not being cued to expect them.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is weird as hell right from the word "go". It's a movie set in Paris but the cast and general sense of slightly dull-eyed polish screams "English prestige picture", though no money came from the UK: it's more German than anything else, financially speaking, on top of being based on a German-language novel and directed by a German. But it's in English. And in case you could square all of that, Dustin Hoffman pokes up in the first half to try on an accent that isn't... anything, really, though I think he was trying to match his English co-stars.
And none of this gets us to the story itself, which is also weird, the kind of weird that had the book labeled as "unfilmable" for a large portion of the 21 years separating its publication from the premiere of the adaptation in 2006. Patrick Süskind, the author of 1985's Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Mörders, is said to have spend over a decade refusing to sell the rights unless the producers were willing to hire either Stanley Kubrick or Miloš Forman to direct it, and the rumor is that at least Kubrick was invited to take the job, but after contemplating it, he couldn't come up with a way to make it work. There are not many things that would make me less enthusiastic about attempting to film an "unfilmable" book than the knowledge, or even the mere suspicion, that Stanley Kubrick of all people in the history of the industry didn't think it could be done, but nonetheless, the project entered development in the early 2000s, eventually picking up Tom Tykwer to direct and work on the script that Andrew Birkin and Bernd Eichinger had been noodling with already. This was at the tail end of the period that Tykwer still seemed like a pretty cool filmmaker somewhere at least tolerably close to the cutting edge; the Run Lola Run glow hadn't quite faded yet. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer didn't do anything to burnish his reputation: the box office was strong, but reviews were mildly baffled and more of the "it's impressive that this wasn't a disaster" flavor than "this is a grand triumph". And it left him open for his next film, 2009's The International, to pretty much kill off his reputation as a major filmmaker; he made three films in the 2010s before decamping to television, and fairly or not, the only one that people still talk about, 2012's Cloud Atlas, mostly gets discussed in terms of Tykwer's co-directors, Lana and Lilly Wachowski.
If this was part of what sent Tykwer on his slow trip to director jail, it's not fair: Perfume probably isn't the film he meant for it to be, and I extremely much doubt it's the film that Süskind wanted it to be, but it's still a pretty incredible ride. Not always a smooth one. But there are not many movies that have replicated its mix of surface-level characteristics: the short version is that this pitched at just about the dead center of the triangle between stilted British period drama, porny exploitation flick, and narratively diffuse art film. Plus it's something of an absurdist dark comedy (the part that I'm not sure if Tykwer was doing on purpose, based on basically everything else I've ever seen that he was involved with) in how it treats some of its bleakest material, soggy blue-grey miserabilism that wallows in the gutter with such abandon, but also with such stylistic flourish, that I can't see any way around finding it kind of grimly hilarious in just how much it wants to impress upon us that 18th Century France was a grotesque hellhole of nonstop human suffering. It's all kind of confused and messy, but it is vivid: before re-watching it for this review, I saw the film one time, 17 years ago during its commercial theatrical release in the U.S., and it left a much more lasting impression on me from movies that came out around the same time that I would have said were "better", including some movies I've seen more than once. Though one of the things I couldn't remember about Perfume was whether or not I actually liked it, and having finally revisited it, I would actually say that feels just right. Being rattled by Perfume and finding it quite a singular, memorable experience but not really being able to confidently say that it was a good or bad experience does indeed feel like a very appropriate response to a movie that is much, much more nuts than it lets on.
The basics of the plot are simple enough: it's a serial killer thriller from the perspective of the killer, whose motivation is a very particular variation on the all-encompassing sexual obsession that's pretty much the solitary motivation that killers in movies ever have. Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw, in one of his early "putting this interesting-looking young actor on the map" roles) is a young man with only one character trait to speak of - I do not say "one personality trait", because I wouldn't say it's clear that he has a personality. What he has instead is a remarkably precise sense of smell, one that can break down the constituent elements of all odors into their smallest elements, while also having the acuity of a trained dog for smelling basically everything. And this would perhaps have left him as nothing but an odd social outcast, as he was at the orphanage growing up, if not for the fateful day when he became particularly entranced by the smell of a young redheaded woman (Karoline Herfurth), and, in his terrifyngly under-socialised way, he wandered after her so he could smell her more closely. The young woman very reasonably panics at this, and Grenouille's attempts to keep her quiet end up with her dead, a development that seems to affect the young man about as much as it affects a dog who discovers all of the delicious food in a garbage can for the first time: neat, probably shouldn't do that in front of people, wonder when I can do it again. From this point on, Grenouille's life is dedicated to becoming a perfumer, so he can learn all of the tricks of extracting scents from objects, and eventually he hopes to use this knowledge to craft a perfume that will remind him of the smell of that rapidly-cooling corpse. That this plan involves several more dead redheads does not seem to cause Grenouille either pleasure or concern. It does, however, make him the center of an increasingly frantic manhunt in the city of Grasse, where he has come to learn the secrets of essence distillation that could not be taught to him in Paris, where he studied the art of perfume-making under a certain Giueseppe Baldini (Hoffman).
I have never read Süskind's book, but my understanding from people who have is that the main challenge in adapting it is that it's written from the subjective viewpoint of a character whose outward behavior offers no hint that he possesses any kind of inner life, and whose actual inner life consists mostly of describing smells. If that was indeed the main problem Tykwer and company had to solve for, then I think we have to count Perfume: The Story of a Murderer as a failure of adaptation. Whishaw's performance, and to be 100% clear I think Whishaw is definitely not at fault in this case, consists largely of "don't have any affect": he's kind of a perfect distillation of a movie psychopath in that he's doing the wide-eyed owl-like staring of a Hannibal Lecter without the theatricality or a Norman Bates without the itchiness. He's giving us nothing, and it is, to be very fair, an active nothing, if that makes sense. His nothing-ness is alarming to look at, and not one time in the entire duration of Whishaw's performance do you get the feeling "this is a guy that I would be happy to have crossed paths with if I met him in real life". He's not not-acting; he's acting nothing, and that does take some doing. But it seems more like a bid to firmly situate Perfume in the genre of serial killer thriller, rather than to find any way to unlock complex material; also, frankly, I think that as far as the leading man goes, everybody involved was more concerned with how Whishaw looked than what he did, because most of the impact the character makes is through his gaunt, spindly frame and grimy skin. None of this, to be sure, is a problem if all we want is for Perfume to function at the level of a thriller, and I don't think that's a slightly invalid or disreputable goal. It's good to have good thrillers. I think Tom Tykwer probably wanted this to function at another level than that, and he didn't get there.
As for the other element of the challenge, the "make a movie about what things smell like", I don't see why that was a problem. There's nothing about the medium of prose that makes it more conducive to portraying smell than the medium of moving pictures. In the very same year that Perfume was theatrically released in most places outside of Europe, the animated film Ratatouille figured out a pretty excellent way to use color, the edges of shapes, and music to evoke a kind of cinematic synesthesia regarding how food tastes. And that was a mainstream Hollywood film for all-ages audiences. A European production with art film bona fides, should be able to do at least as much to evoke a non-audiovisual sensation through audiovisual means. That didn't turn out to be the case, and honestly, the filmmakers largely approached that problem by not trying. Pretty much the only strategy Tykwer ever employs to depict "Grenouille smells something" is to use quick, expressive cuts to insert shots of the things he's smelling, sometimes using tracking shots to evoke how he moves from smell to smell. Which is, I'm pretty sure, the absolute first idea anybody would ever have in tackling this problem, and which only ever really gets us as far as depicting smells in a strictly narrative context. What's missing is things like the moment where Grenouille crossly explains to Baldini that he can't find a way to distill the scent of glass, and Baldini is perplexed by the notion that glass even has a scent. That's an opportunity to do something for the viewer to take us out of the movie and visually render an essence of glassiness in a way that can at least suggest the alien forms inside the killer's mind, but Perfume generally doesn't even feint in that direction.
So much for what the movie isn't, and on to the much happier matter of what it is. As I've said, if Perfume: The Story of a Murderer mostly ignores everything prior to the colon in its title, what remains can still be a pretty rollicking story of a murderer, and I honestly do thing it manages. Whishaw's performance is more of a particularly austere, glacial, art-filmy movie monster than as a person, but he is also, crucially, a good movie monster. Having pondered the matter for both a little bit and also, more loosely, for 17 years, I think it's fair to say that Perfume works better as a sordid, morally impure exploitation thriller that throws its target audience for a loop by wearing all of the clothes of a stately middlebrow art picture than it does as a middlebrow art picture full of scenes of Whishaw rubbing wax or his nose all over naked women playing corpses, and it's a pity for the film that was manufactured and marketed in the opposite way of how it actually works. I mean, it definitely doesn't think that it's an exploitation film. If nothing else, anything that was even secretly targeting that audience would hopefully have been smart enough to avoid the 147-minute running time that is absolutely trying to force this into "serious European film for serious European filmgoers" mode.
Also, I frankly think that the fact that movie really doesn't want to be sordid and scuzzy is exactly what makes it so fucking weird. Grindhouse movies about kinky killers grabbing in close-up at the tits of very patient actresses playing dead are common enough, but very close to none of them set up permanent encampment in my brain the way Perfume has done, because none of them are wrong. I mean, you might want to argue that they're "wrong" in some kind of ethical sense, but they know what they're doing and why, and the audience knows that also. Perfume, to judge from every possible element of its production, isn't trying to be this kind of movie. Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman (who feels much more in his element than Hoffman) don't get cast in this kind of movie. I didn't really go into it up top, but if you watched any random slice of the movie where someone isn't dying and it's not the climactic sequence (which is also lost in the wasteland between "art film about sex" and "dirty movie for the raincoat brigade", though I do think it skews more toward the former), I don't think you would have a second thought that what you were watching was just another British period drama of a sort that were omnipresent in the 1990s and were still a pretty dominant fact of moviegoing life in the mid-'00s. Especially the elements about perfume making, which are objectively pretty fascinating to watch, and have that slice-of-life "we're watching a plotless movie about people doing things that are interesting and also don't typically show up in movies" energy that art cinema has thrived on since the '70s or earlier. Rickman's presence in the second half certainly enforces that feeling, though I think it would still feel odd that Hoffman is present.
Honestly, there's a sense in which the most inexplicable thing about Perfume: The Story of a Murderer isn't that it's lurid, but that it's German rather than British (though that perhaps goes some way towards explaining why it's also lurid). This has some intense "Film4 Productions" energy, and it seems very pointedly targeting nice bourgeois audiences with its concern with capturing the textures and costumes of 18th Century life in a way that's obviously more dramatic than documentarian, but still wants to be unobtrusively realistic. But it also opens with a sequence cut so swiftly that it's almost a montage of how a woman squeezes out a baby and tries to kill it in the filth-streaked streets of some shitty French town before she's summarily executed, and ends with SPOILERS an onscreen orgy and offscreen cannibalism. It's a mismatch that makes the grotty material feel even more disreputable, and makes the "we want Oscars" vibe of the production design and cinematography feel like some kind of sick joke. It feels too straightforward for most of its long length to really come across as the work of provocateurs, though I can't really think of another way to receive it; at any rate, it has a nasty heart, whether it meant to or not, and while I wouldn't exactly say it feels "dangerous" in the way it combines irreconcilable filmmaking modes, it's certainly striking to keep tripping over sleazy interludes in a place where you're not being cued to expect them.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
