Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, 2006
Dir. Tom Tykwer"I will look deep into your eyes...and drop by drop I will trickle my disgust into them like burning acid until, you finally perish."
Perfume is the story of a young man, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born with an odd power, a power no man on earth could match...the power of the finest sense of smell known to man. After an accident he seeks out a way to keep and preserve smells of not just roses and the typical fragrances we're accustomed to...no, Jean-Baptiste is looking for a way to preserve human smells. Through any means.
Let's start with the good, because that will be an altogether smaller list. Tom Tykwer, a director I'm completely unfamiliar with, has a wonderfully scenic eye that he brings to the film. For as much as the film falters on so many levels, it's always breathtakingly beautiful, complete with panoramic views of older, foreign cities (much credit goes out to the production design here, as well), to wide open fields that are vast and colorfully painted. As well many scenes incorporate heavy use of flowers which add even more color and beauty to an already masterfully shot film. The narrator, played by John Hurt, is also one of the best things about this film. Along the likes of Stephen Fry, his voice is a perfect fit for narration, and it fits the whimsy this film tries so desperately to convey.
But that's where I start taking serious fault with the film. It tries to have a whimsical tone, but at the same time demands to be taken seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it makes it had to determine whether this is a comedy, drama, horror, or biopic. Sometimes a mixture of tones can work wonders for a film, but here it just heightens the faults with the script and the story. Imagine trying to mix A Series of Unfortunate Events with Zodiac...two films so completely different, that it's hard to see similarities, yet this film does just that, and does it really poorly.
Jean-Baptiste is our central focus, and he is very much an anti-hero, which some people will automatically not like. I'm a huge fan of the anti-hero and have no problem accepting this kind of role, however, the film tries in vain to get you to feel sympathy and care for this character, without earning any sympathy for him at all. He's played mute for most of the film, due to the character's lesser intelligence (I imagine, anyways), but instead of having that come off as a quirk or something we could look past, it ends up being a serious flaw in how the character's written. He isn't charismatic, and there's nothing endearing about him. I would be very surprised if anyone truly cared about Jean-Baptiste, even Tykwer himself, because it seems even the people behind the camera felt nothing about this character.
So on top of an uninteresting and non-sympathetic lead, we have a series of side characters introduced and thrown away as if they were nothing. It's clear the director didn't care about any of these characters because everyone Jean-Baptiste meets in the film, dies in a horribly random and meaningless way after he leaves them. Instead of evoking emotions from the audience, all this really does is cheapen every other character in the film, and tells us that we should only be interested in Jean-Baptiste's story and plight...but as I've mentioned he's an impossible character to get behind, let alone be interesting enough to be the lead.
And finally there's this ludicrousness that emanates the film from the beginning to the end. Jean-Baptiste is portrayed almost as a superhero with his sense of smell as heightened as it is. Again, this goes back to my complaints with the tone of the film, because it's really hard to take seriously. From the offset the audience is treated to an embarrassing shot of an infant Jean-Baptiste sniffing a kid's finger...now, that doesn't sound too ridiculous as I've typed it, but believe me, the shot is so weird and random that it took me completely out of the film. And then from that moment onwards, I struggled to get back into the film. But let's forget all those smaller scenes that may have bugged me, and they did, but it's one of the last scenes of the film, that portrays Jean-Baptiste on his way to getting hanged for his crimes...which then devolves into one of the biggest and oldest orgies caught on film...and sparked because of his heavenly perfume he created. Now, I know that was a long, most-likely run-on sentence, but read it again, because that actually happened. It leads to an overly long, and eye-rollingly bad scene that I can easily say is one of the most embarrassing things I've seen in a film. If I was Tykwer, I'd be personally ashamed that I put that on film, not because of the immorality of an orgy or anything, but just how basely stupid an idea it is. Jean-Baptiste walks away completely clean and free of the charges, because of this perfume he concocted. It's an inane and horrible way to end the film, and any kind of credibility it was trying to earn was absolutely lost at the end for myself.
This reviewer has written more than this film deserved, but believe me when I say it's not only an embarrassingly dumb, and poorly executed story, but it's easily one of the most far-fetched pieces of cinema I've seen...and that's saying quite a bit. If you want to see a good film about heightened sense, watch Ratatouille. If you want to see a film about an anti-hero done very well, watch American Psycho. But above all, please, please, please don't watch Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.
1 out of 5
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