Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Sometimes, when I get a movie from Netflix, it sits near my TV for a couple of weeks, unwatched. I think I want to watch it when I order it, but I lose interest before it arrives in my mailbox. I’ll get a couple other movies (I have the three at-a-time service), watch them, and return them before I get around to watching the one I originally wanted. Last night I finally watched one of those movies and that movie was Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

Warning: I recount the story in detail, so spoilers abound. If you plan on watching the movie, do it first, and then read my review.

Tom Tykwer (be sure to pronounce that W like a V; he’s German) directs Perfume. It’s the story of a French perfumer/serial killer set in 18th century Paris. It’s a period piece: strike one. It’s about making perfume: strike two. It stars Dustin Hoffman as an Italian perfumer; strike three. Dustin Hoffman is not the main character…he’s the mentor of the main character. His accent is terrible. His powdered wig and make-up make him look like an older version of Jason Schwartzman from Marie Antoinette. I’m getting ahead of myself--on to the story.

The movie begins with some voice-over narration by John Hurt. We are introduced to the dirty, dingy world of Paris, France circa 1760. The place smells like ass. You can tell this because all the residents of France have bad teeth, filthy skin, and greasy hair. The camera zooms in on the stinkiest part of Paris, the fish market. A pregnant lady is vending fish. Her face gets tight and she proceeds to hide under the table (where all the fish heads and fish spleens are discarded) and gives birth to a baby boy. She thinks he’s stillborn. Then he starts to cry. The mother runs away and the child is given to a local orphanage.

Because this baby was born in the stinkiest part of Paris during the stinkiest time in history, he is cursed with a superpower that no one would wish upon himself or herself. He has an extraordinary sense of smell. We learn this via montage and voice-over. This kid (hereafter referred to as Jean-Baptiste Grenouille) can smell rocks and frogs and water and stuff. He doesn’t distinguish between good and bad smells. That’s fortuitous, because most of his world smells like ass and garlic. He has a rough childhood in the orphanage and works as a tanner during his teens. He walks awkwardly, but the movie never explains why. He’s always sniffing things. He is The Sniffer.

One night, on his way home from work, The Sniffer smells a sublime scent (sorry). The scent emanates from an attractive, redheaded peasant girl. Grenouille stalks her, sneaks up close to her, and sniffs her. He is driven insane by her fragrant beauty. He wants to own her scent…to bottle it up. So, he kills her and smells her naked body, greedily cupping her odor to his nose. Grenouille quickly learns that scent is fleeting, so he searches for a way to make it permanent. He goes to a few perfume shops and learns about the art of perfume making. He doesn’t really want to make perfume from flowers and oils; he wants to make perfume from the bodies of dead women. He wants to distill the scent of beauty. He finds work for an Italian perfumer played by Dustin Hoffman (as himself…not really).

The Sniffer learns from his mentor that the only place where he can learn to capture the scent of things is in Grasse (Southern France). Off he goes. He walks the whole way, spending some time in the mountains meditating, growing a beard, and looking like Jesus. He almost dies, but then he has an epiphany. He gets a job at a place that extracts the scent from flowers using some sort of distillation technology. The Sniffer uses this technology to make his own, special perfume. He hunts the attractive women in the town, clubs them over the head, smears them in animal fat, wraps them in cloths, cuts their hair, removes the cloths that have somehow trapped their scent, distills the stuff, and obtains a couple of ounces of perfume, which he stores in a wooden box. He then places the naked bodies in various locations in the town to be found by the locals. People get pissed and form lynch mobs. In fact, there are quite a few angry mobs in this movie, as there must be, because this is a period piece.

One really hot redhead, played by Rachel Hurd-Wood, lives in this town (I think this director has something for redheads…remember Run Lola Run?). She is The Sniffer’s ultimate prize. Her dad is that Snape guy from the Harry Potter movies (Alan Rickman). Redheads must smell better than blondes and brunettes because they really get The Sniffer by the olfactory nerves. When Snape finds out there is madman loose, stalking the pretty ladies of his town, he flees with his daughter in tow. There is a subplot about an arranged marriage that the girl doesn’t want to be involved in. The Sniffer sets out after them, following their scents to a castle-like home on the ocean. He sneaks in at night and robs the beauty of her lovely fragrance.

Snape finds his bald daughter’s lifeless body the next morning. He sends out a search party to find the killer. They apprehend The Sniffer rather easily, but not before he mixes together all the dead girls’ perfumes into one ultimate perfume…the most potent perfume the world has ever witnessed. As he is lead toward the gallows, he puts some of the stuff on himself and people fall before him and worship him like Jesus. When the angry lynch mob gets a whiff of his beautiful stink, they drop to their knees in adulation. The Sniffer puts some of the perfume on a handkerchief and lets it float out over the crowd, spawning one of the most ridiculous orgy scenes ever captured on film (kind of like Eyes Wide Shut and Caligula). Dirty, naked bodies writhe and twist and hump and squirm and groan and sigh. There are boobs and butts, but no balls or wieners. I guess they wanted to keep this one in the R rating zone.

That’s about it. The Sniffer overcomes a world that stinks like ass and garlic and creates a perfume that makes people fuck ravenously upon smelling it. With his goal accomplished, he returns to his place of birth (the fish market), covers himself in his perfume, and gets eaten by passerby. Awesome. Roger Ebert really liked this movie. You can read his review here.

I, on the other hand, didn’t like this movie. It tries too hard to make the murderer seem sympathetic (if you want to see something that accomplishes this much more effectively, watch Showtime’s Dexter). In the making-of documentary, one of the producers says the movie is amoral (portrayed in the film by the idea that The Sniffer doesn’t distinguish between pleasant and foul scents). I don’t agree. A murderer is a murderer, except in the case of Dexter; he's cool. The director says that the movie is an examination of our celebrity-infatuated culture. The Sniffer, a nobody, becomes a somebody by putting on some perfume (a façade). I think that’s an interesting way to view the material, but it doesn’t make the film any more entertaining.

Poster Tagline: This Perfume smells like ass and garlic.