"perfume - the story of a murderer" opens today. i was lucky enough to see an advance screening back in early december. although i rarely do anything in the middle of the holiday madness except make perfume, sell perfume and pass out at the end of the day, i was determined to go and i'm glad i did. i enjoyed this film very much.
it looked spectacular and every scene was lush with detail. though i've been known to sit happily through the most appalling rubbish as long as it looks good ("the cell" & "streets of fire" spring to mind), the story of "perfume" was perfectly compelling as well almost from the start.
it's been a few years since i've read suskind's brilliantly bizarre novel from end to end but from what i remember the film remained quite true to his story. of course there were a few changes; some moments were made a bit more sensational and certain fascinating bits were cut altogether. this is to be expected i suppose for how does one visually translate something so completely intangible as perfume or the stunning impact of a smell...?
i met a german director a few years ago who'd done several of patrick suskind's plays in berlin. i remember asking him if he'd considered a film version of "perfume" but he said it was impossible. i couldn't agree. even then i knew that the power of scent can clearly be seen in the expression of those who encounter it.
tom twyker understands the curious emotional quality of scent implicitly and that's one of the things that makes his fim so wonderful to watch. the audience may not be truly able to smell the brilliant perfumes grenouille creates but we know ther effect. every subtle nuance is there to be read in just one look. when it comes to depicting olfactory impact, the face says it all.
i thought the cast was marvelous - especially alan rickman who pulls off one of those "angels will weep" type speeches that from the mouths of lesser actors would make me wonder if that ham had been smoked or honey-cured. i'd heard before i saw "perfume" that two of the characters had been seriously miscast - dustin hoffman & ben whishaw. i can't agree. i thought hoffman's interpretation of the aged perfumer both funny & very touching - especially in those moments when he realizes that he'll never possess the gifts of his young apprentice or ever be able to create such glorious perfumes. i'd forgotten that his character is disposed of so quickly and i found myself wishing to see more of him.
as for ben whishaw as grenouille, i didn't find him "too pretty" in the least. from what i remember, grenouille is repellent because of his unkempt filthy appearance, his perfectly apathetic demeanor and his total lack of human smell. this was one brilliant aspect of the novel that wasn't included in the film for fairly obvious reasons. even i can't imagine how to visually convey how deeply disturbing and unsettling it would be to encounter a man with no human odor. i think cutting this crucial element was my only real complaint with the film. to me grenouille's true motivation was to create a smell that would break his lifelong isolation and truly connect him with the rest of the human race. we take too much for granted the importance of our own inherent smell...
so grenouille's physical appearance wasn't important to me - he was ruined from birth and the damage was all inside. i thought whishaw created a grenouille pretty much as i imagined - intense, withdrawn and obviously driven by a consuming passion almost impossible to comprehend. unless one has a particular kind of nose which i do...
i've been compared to suskind's grenouille many times and i have to say it makes me very uncomfortable. now most of those who make this comparison are quick to add "but in a good way". i'm always happy to hear that as i have not been boiling virgins in my basement or distilling the juice from puppies and i don't intend to start. nor can i determine the emotional wellbeing of a cow by the smell of her milk and i'm not sure i could if i wanted to.
but is has been made clear to me over the years that i do experience the world that surrounds us all in a way few can understand. how many people take the time to notice the subtle differences of the mundane things we use every day? how many people can imagine a smell encountered years ago and recreate it at will? how many people recognize the smell of porcelain, glass or snow...?
well i can and i do and i confess it frightens me to think that the only other human, real or imagined, who might share this talent is a psychopathic lunatic. i think that's the aspect of "perfume" that i've always found so terrifying.
i perpetually notice smells that others don't or can't and these olfactory impressions seem to stay with me always. in fact as i was watching "perfume" i noticed a very strange sensation especially during the early parts of the film. when grenouille smelled apples, so did i. the scents of a sunlit brook swirled through my head even before the narrator described them and almost before the camera showed them. these olfactory sensations were so strong that i began to think they must have been pumping fragrance into the screening room and when the stench of dead rat nearly caused me to heave my lunch, i leant over to my friend virginia and asked her if she smelled dead rat too.
"what are you talking about??" she whispered back. it was then that i realized that these smells were all in my head and i was experiencing them from memory only. i was "seeing" the film in a kind of phantosmic odorama that sony would pay millions to patent. it was very strange...
it did turn out that some of the odorama effects weren't solely in my imagination - some of them were real. when grenouille first follows the plum girl, my nostrils caught the warm lush scent of skin. later on as baldini attempts to identify the ingredients in a competitor's perfume, a smelled a wave of jasmines. through much of "perfume" the odors of skin, jasmine, perfume or fresh flowers rose and fell and i knew they were real. at first i thought someone sitting nearby was wearing a really good fragrance and tried to sniff out who it was. eventually though i realized the scent was coming from ME. i'd put on "cradle of light" before venturing into manhattan that evening and as i watched the film, my nose caught the appropriate aspects of my own perfume - skin, jasmine, jonquil all wafted to my nose in accord with the story. this may sound a bit like bragging but i don't care - to me it was a truly delightful surprise...
before the screening started, we were told that thierry mugler had created a range of perfumes inspired by the film and that these would be presented in the lobby after the show ended. i must say i was curious to sniff one or two of them especially some of the 18th century paris notes and those that smelt of "baby" or "skin". unfortunately this was not to be. when virginia and i walked out of the screening room, one whiff of the ambient air laden with obviously fake aromachemicals told me all i needed to know. those scents were clearly not my kind of thing at all and we got the hell out of there as quickly as we could.
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"perfume - the story of a murderer" wrapped me up in another world simultaneously visible and unseen. for two and a half hours, i breathed the air of another time from the sublime to the appalling. but afterwards, as we left the paramount building in times square, my nose was instantly assaulted by the stink of the new millenium: rotting garbage, stale vomit, dirty concrete, stale steam from the subway, overheated fat and the massive smell of a hundred thousand people. it's difficult to understand just how badly paris stank under the ancien regime but contemporary new york clearly has its own unique olfactory horror. civilization may be different but humanity still smells the same.
though i haven't had time to write about "perfume" until now i've been thinking a lot about it this past month and i look forward to seeing it again soon. for several years i've been experimenting with "skin" scents and smells that are undeniably human. when i heard about the perfumes created for "perfume" back in the spring, i put this project to rest for a while with the exception of CBMUSK. i think though that it's time to revive that idea and i'm going to dig those bottles out of my archive and have another sniff...
perhaps i enjoy "perfume" as only a perfumer can. it explores a world i know intimately yet a sense that most too often take for granted. our modern brains evolved from ancient olfactory organs and everything we think and feel originated in our ability to smell. the nose still tells us who we are and who we love - it fits us into family & community and without it we are lost. suskind's premise fascinates me - we may choose to ignore it but it is Smell that makes us human.