Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Eau
de Redhead
(Perfume: the Story of a Murderer, 1/15/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Did
women in the gutters of 18th century Paris smell especially good?
This is the unlikely question at
the heart of Tom (Run Lola Run) Tykwer's gothic horror, Perfume:
The Story of a Murderer. Given that the answer is certainly a resounding
"no!", it is to the credit of Tykwer and producer/co-writer
Bernd Eichinger (Downfall, Last Exit to Brooklyn) that their
film still has an appealing fragrance, with an earthy head chord and
a base that is definitely nutty.
Hazy on perfumery jargon? The reader
would do well to read Patrick Süskind's 1985 novel, which was the
best-selling piece of German-language fiction since All Quiet on
the Western Front (and, incidentally, grunge-rocker Kurt Cobain's
favorite book). It concerns one Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the dirt-poor
son of a fishmonger, born with the olfactory equivalent of perfect pitch.
Devoting his life to experiencing every scent in the world, Grenouille
(Ben Whishaw) becomes obsessed with distilling the most intoxicating
odor of all: the scent of fresh, nubile womanhood. Alas, because poor
Jean-Baptiste has no social graces at all, the only way he can get close
to les bonnes filles—and especially his favorite doe-eyed
redheads—is to murder them first. The suspense is over whether
Grenouille can finish his potion before he is apprehended by the baffled
authorities.
That anybody would attempt to make
a movie about scent seems like a category error—sort of like trying
to bake a cake about existentialism. Tywker, who is no stranger to cinematic
pyrotechnics, succeeds in this case by heightening every other sensual
impression in the film, from lush color to exquisite sound. Cinematographer
Frank Griebe suffuses the women, in particular, with a creamy glow that
makes them both ethereal and perilously delicate. Despite the fact that
the movie has more close-ups of flaring nostrils and up-nose shots than
this reviewer would prefer to see ever again, the experience is just
bizarre enough to be diverting. We almost forget that the experience
of being stripped naked, smeared with pork fat and scrapped with a sharp
instrument is a spa experience many people would pay for, much less
flee from. Meanwhile, the eye-opening conclusion (of which nothing more
will be divulged here) seems like something out of the decadent heyday
of Ken (The Devils, Altered States) Russell.
Newcomer Whishaw is not exactly
the typical gothic villain. Almost mute and utterly without self-consciousness,
his character comes off as a relentless but somewhat dull monster, like
a very persistent DHL courier desperate for a signature. He's joined,
somewhat jarringly, by Dustin Hoffman as the has-been celebrity perfumer
who teaches young Jean-Baptiste the tricks of his trade, and by Alan
Rickman as the father of one of his would-be victims.
The subtext of Perfume, of
course, is that Grenouille is mad but his goal is conventional. As volumes
of feminist critiques have and will point out, extracting and selling
the essence of young womanhood is arguably the holy grail of every advertiser
on the planet. It hardly seems an accident, then, that after the murderer
is done with his victims they are prone, stripped, and shaved, like
heroin waifs after the modelling gigs run out. Somewhere, Kurt Cobain
is nodding his head at the familiarity of it.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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