Perfume: The Story of a Murderer – directed by Tom Tykwer (2006)

Every bit as bonkers as the book. Part fairy tale, mostly nightmare

Filed under: film, patrick suskind, perfume, tom tykwer

This came out in 2006 and is based on the 1985 novel by Patrick Suskind. I read and loved the book last summer.

It’s the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an orphan in 18th-century Paris with an inhuman sense of smell. He grows up to understand how to use this to gain advantage and manipulate those around him. Like any addiction, things spiral. That’s all you need to know going in.

The movie pulls no punches. From the first scene (post-introduction), director Tom Tykwer (the Run Lola Run guy) is determined to make the viewer hold their breath. The narrator describes the smell of 18th-century Paris, while we watch a fish market in gruesome action. A pregnant lady gives birth under a table and goes back to work, expecting the baby to be stillborn and swept away at the end of the day.

The aggressive visual tone persists throughout. After his first murder, Grenouille strips his victim and is overcome by the scent of her, rubbing his hands across her body and scooping them up to his face to smell. The scene is uncomfortable, unsettlingly intimate and very effective.

Like Run Lola Run, there are segments that feel like a music video. Every shot feels carefully art directed. Tykwer does an outstanding job of conveying ideas of scent. Many scenes are basically Grenouille sniffing the air and following his nose, but they aren’t cartoonish.

The film follows the plot of the book faithfully. There are a couple of scenes late in the book that I was sure would be reinterpreted for the film. You’ll have to see it for yourself, but I was surprised at how well they were executed.

The person I watched it with knew nothing about it going in, and they loved it too. It’s weird, gruesome and unsettling, but it does a good job of drawing out Suskind’s bigger themes about alienation, the dynamics of power, and idolatry.