Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Grade: A

Scene: 1700s Paris.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille deserves a PhD in the Hard Knocks of Life. Left to die by his mother after she gives birth to him in a fetid fish market, he's endowed with a superhuman sense of smell that compels him to persevere through a childhood in a derelict orphanage and teen years as a slave laborer in a tannery that resembles the hottest and grimiest vicious circle of Dante's Inferno. Eventually he discovers his passion for making perfume, working alongside an Italian (played with verve by Dustin Hoffman, though his accent changes every other sentence) until he journeys to Grasse, the perfume capital of France.

Jean-Baptiste has one little problem. He's a serial killer who murders women with a swift blow to the back of their heads. To enliven the party, he then smears animal fat all over them so he can capture their essential essences to create a scent that has the power to transform the world, potentially in wonderful ways.

I missed Perfume during its blink-and-you'll-miss-it theatrical run, though I wanted to catch it because it's directed by visionary Run Lola Run helmer Tom Tykwer. It just came out on DVD, and I recommend that you check it out even if the subject matter sounds too gruesome. With its charming narrator and its restrained approach to violence and sexuality, it plays like a fairy tale - albeit a truly sick and twisted one. Jean-Claude is an unloved and fundamentally innocent creature, and young British actor Ben Whishaw summons up truckloads of evocative and pained facial expressions to make this one of the most sympathetic psychopaths ever. His performance is award worthy, though the film's poor box office reception and mediocre reviews will undoubtedly shut him out of consideration.

Based on an acclaimed 1986 novel by German scribe Patrick Suskin, Perfume is so original and thought provoking that I'm inclined to overlook it's slightly overlong running time. Several major directors took a crack at this material over the past twenty years, including Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese. They both concluded that the book was unfilmable. I haven't read the novel yet, but my bet is that Tykwer's film will go down in the record books as a true original whether or not it captures the true essence of Suskin's novel.