Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
By DEREK ELLEY
Variety
The seductive, sensory prose of Patrick Suskind's bestseller, "Perfume," reaches the screen with loads of visual panache but only intermittent magic in producer Bernd Eichinger and helmer Tom Tykwer's long-awaited pic version. In many respects, it's too faithful to the 1985 novel: an almost impossible to adapt reportage-cum-reverie, written from an ironic modern viewpoint, about an 18th century Parisian orphan who turns mass murderer in search of the perfect scent, Love. Euro big-budgeter, shot in English on a reported tab of E50 million ($63.7 million), has a readymade fan base, especially in Europe, among the book's 15 million readers but is more high-end fare in Anglo markets.
Released Sept. 14 in Germany, where it's well on its way to hitting a hunky 3 million admissions in its first month, pic has already started its three-month rollout across most of the rest of Europe. First test in an Anglophone territory will be Blighty on Dec. 8; Stateside release is skedded for Dec. 27.
Suskind, a reclusive Munich writer, refused to sell the screen rights for many years, finally yielding to Eichinger's repeated requests in 2001. (In the meantime, Suskind had co-written the superb ensembler "Rossini," which Eichinger's Constantin Film distribbed in 1997.) British writer-director Andrew Birkin worked first with Eichinger on the script, and they were then joined by Tykwer ("Run Lola Run"), who finally took over the helming reins.
Tykwer seems the ideal choice, having shown a grasp for contempo magic realism and highly metaphysical material in earlier pics like Expressionistic psychothriller "Deadly Maria" (1993) and Cate Blanchett starrer "Heaven" (2002), Tykwer's most recent feature. Problem with "Perfume" is not so much how to make the audience identify with a largely silent, olfactory-obsessed nerd who turns serial killer, but how to transmit his compulsion in the strictly audiovisual medium of film. (AromaRama and Smell-O-Vision, which dispensed odors into theaters, died a quick death in 1959-60.)
Tykwer's early solution -- paralleling Suskind's stench-heavy opening prose -- is to lay on the visual grunge of 18th century Paris. After an opening, in 1766, showing Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw) being led to hear his death sentence read to a braying crowd, pic flashes back 22 years. We see his birth in a stinking fish market, his childhood in an orphanage run by the money-grabbing Mme. Gaillard (Sian Thomas) and his apprenticeship in a filthy tannery under thug-with-boils Grimal (Sam Douglas).
Parallel with this visual onslaught, an offscreen narrator (an excellent John Hurt in the English version; veteran thesp Otto Sander in German prints) preserves some of Suskind's irony as he describes Grenouille's growing obsession with "the fleeting world of scent." His olfactory sense becomes so highly tuned that it nullifies all other human qualities, including love, compassion and personal communication.
More than just a killer-thriller or the tale of a man with an exceptional gift, "Perfume" is a skewed love story, of a man who suddenly discovers the "scent of woman" but can't make the jump into real relationships.
Wandering in nighttime Paris, Grenouille catches the scent of a young woman selling plums (Karoline Herfurth). Almost accidentally, he strangles her, and then, in one of the film's most powerful sequences, tries to preserve her bodily scent in his memory by sniffing her naked corpse.
Grenouille's opportunity to develop his obsession comes in the form of onetime successful parfumier Giuseppe Baldini (Dustin Hoffman), whom he persuades to take him on as an apprentice.
When Grenouille discovers that human scent can't be bottled, he sets out on his own to Provence, in southern France -- to the town of Grasse, which specializes in enfleurage, extracting the essence of flowers. Joining a firm run by Mme. Arnulfi (German thesp Corinna Harfouch), and becoming obsessed by the virginal scent of local beauty Laura (newcomer Rachel Hurd-Wood), daughter of widowed merchant Antoine Richis (Alan Rickman), he turns to mass murder to produce the ultimate femme-scent cocktail.
Apart from scissoring an episode set in Montpellier, script is extremely faithful to Suskind's book -- indeed, more liberties should have been taken to make the novel work on the screen. During its first hour, prior to Provence, film is entertaining on a visual level, with Uli Hanisch's extraordinary production design and Pierre-Yves Gayraud's lived-in costumes giving a real feel for 18th century Paris without too much exaggeration.
But with far too big a chunk of screentime given to Hoffman's unconvincing perf as the charlatan Baldini, pic is slow moving . Despite Hurt's toney voiceover, and all the shots of Grenouille's twitching nose and talk of scent manufacture, there's a limit to how well any film can convey the protag's sensory dilemma.
Film really gets under way in the Grasse half, with the brighter, more colorful vistas, and Grenouille finally deciding to show the world he's not a nobody. With Rickman proving a classy combatant as a father seeking to protect his only child, picture starts to grip in human terms. Only during the yarn's final segment, which plays OK in the book but looks daft onscreen, does "Perfume" really lose its bouquet.
Major kudos go to 25-year-old Whishaw, recently seen as Keith Richards in "Stoned," for his half-angel, half-devil perf as Grenouille, a difficult role into which the young British thesp throws himself with conviction. Among the many fine supports, Harfouch seems shortchanged in a part that seems to have suffered from cuts.
Though it may offend enthusiasts of the original, tightening throughout by some 20 minutes would improve the movie dramatically. But even in its present form, pic is still, like the novel, an extraordinarily brave, challenging piece of work. If Tykwer & Co. had cut loose a bit more, and gone for the heart rather than the intellect, "Perfume" could have been a fragrant treat indeed.
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Screen Daily.
Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer
Jonathan Romney in London 14 September 2006
Dir: Tom Tykwer. Ger-Fr-Sp. 2006. 140mins.
Tom Tykwer pulls out all the stops with his sumptuous English-language adaptation of Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume, making for a daring and imposing achievement that is likely to leave audiences stunned and somewhat exhausted rather than truly dazzled.
With its dark tone, wilfully morbid subject matter and antipathetic protagonist, it is unlikely to recapture the commercial success of the source novel, which has sold 15m copies worldwide (4m in Germany) since publication in 1985.
Despite extravagant production design, occasional show-stopping sequences and a flair for grisly historical flavour a la Terry Gilliam, Perfume never quite feels like the distinctively authored piece that it might have been, and is often too caught up in detailed historical scene-setting to catch the eccentric and ironic magic-realist flavour of Suskind’s philosophical fable. Critical response is likely to regard it as a prestige hit, admired rather than much liked.
In German-language territories – Perfume opens on 800 prints in Germany and Switzerland from Sept 14, a week after its Sept 7 world premiere - returns will be very strong. Expect good, if lesser, box-office for this European co-production in those other parts of the continent – it reaches France on Oct 4, Spain on Nov 24 and the UK on Dec 8 – which welcomed similar literary adaptations like The Name Of The Rose (also produced by Constantin).
In the US – where the R-rated Perfume enjoys limited release through Paramount from Dec 27 - it is likely to figure more in awards consideration for its production credits than at the box office, in part due to its distinctly European brand of refined perversity.
Set in 18th-century France, the film – narrated dryly by John Hurt - tells of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Whishaw), born into squalor in a gruesomely malodorous fish market, and raised as a solitary outsider in an orphanage, where he discovers he is gifted (or cursed) with an abnormally acute sense of smell.
As a young man, he comes under the tutelage of Baldini (Hoffman), a once-great perfumer, whom he dazzles by his ability to knock up exquisite scents with the instinctive panache of a cocktail mixer. But Baldini’s patronage is not enough for the obsessive dreams of Grenouille, who is intent on capturing definitively the smell of everything and anything – from metal to dead cats to (eventually) people.
Grenouille heads south to Grasse in Provence, where he starts murdering young women with an aim to distilling the perfect scent. His ultimate victim seems fated to be the gorgeous, tres fragrant Laura (Hurd-Wood), daughter of merchant Richis (Rickman).
Grenouille finally looks set to face justice, but it’s then that he uncorks his final perfume with sexually spectacular results, capping the film in an audacious tableau that is likely to stand as the film’s great claim to posterity.
Tykwer, once enfant terrible of new German cinema, comfortably settles into his new role as a confident orchestrator of elaborate spectacle. Fans of Run Lola Run will be surprised to see how much Perfume at times resembles a traditional stately costume drama, complete with an often lethargic pace that stretches its running time excessively (Suskind’s tightly-narrated fable runs to around 260 pages in its Penguin edition).
The film makes most of an impression in the Paris-set first hour, particularly with a sequence on Grenouille’s birth that briskly and unnervingly establishes the sheer squalor of the 18th-century city.
Things slow down for the spell in Baldini’s shop, where the interior scenes feel theatrical rather than cinematic, and where the narrative holds back to make space for Dustin Hoffman’s extravagant performance. Powdered and wigged to resemble Mr Punch, Hoffman plays Baldini for grotesque comedy, with a distracting Italo-Brooklyn accent, and his camp flamboyance rather overpowers the film. Yet when he drops out of the picture - about an hour in through a magnificent CG sight gag - Perfume suddenly feels a lot less fun.
Tykwer does not quite work out how best to use Ben Whishaw, whose saturnine, punky demeanour is certainly unsettling, but who is never quite the centre of proceedings. One of the problems is how to dramatise a character who is 100% obsession and whose being revolves entirely around the olfactory (and who, what’s more, barely speaks). As the murder theme takes over in the second half, so Grenouille becomes a period precursor of the modern movie line of fetishistic serial killers, rather than the elemental figure he appears in Suskind’s magic-realist novel.
To give the film the ironic, fable-like tone it requires, Hurt’s elegantly laconic narration – as in Lars Von Trier’s Manderlay and Dogville – is called on to do a little more work than it ideally might have.
Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer
Jonathan Romney in London 14 September 2006
Dir: Tom Tykwer. Ger-Fr-Sp. 2006. 140mins.
Tom Tykwer pulls out all the stops with his sumptuous English-language adaptation of Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume, making for a daring and imposing achievement that is likely to leave audiences stunned and somewhat exhausted rather than truly dazzled.
With its dark tone, wilfully morbid subject matter and antipathetic protagonist, it is unlikely to recapture the commercial success of the source novel, which has sold 15m copies worldwide (4m in Germany) since publication in 1985.
Despite extravagant production design, occasional show-stopping sequences and a flair for grisly historical flavour a la Terry Gilliam, Perfume never quite feels like the distinctively authored piece that it might have been, and is often too caught up in detailed historical scene-setting to catch the eccentric and ironic magic-realist flavour of Suskind’s philosophical fable. Critical response is likely to regard it as a prestige hit, admired rather than much liked.
In German-language territories – Perfume opens on 800 prints in Germany and Switzerland from Sept 14, a week after its Sept 7 world premiere - returns will be very strong. Expect good, if lesser, box-office for this European co-production in those other parts of the continent – it reaches France on Oct 4, Spain on Nov 24 and the UK on Dec 8 – which welcomed similar literary adaptations like The Name Of The Rose (also produced by Constantin).
In the US – where the R-rated Perfume enjoys limited release through Paramount from Dec 27 - it is likely to figure more in awards consideration for its production credits than at the box office, in part due to its distinctly European brand of refined perversity.
Set in 18th-century France, the film – narrated dryly by John Hurt - tells of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Whishaw), born into squalor in a gruesomely malodorous fish market, and raised as a solitary outsider in an orphanage, where he discovers he is gifted (or cursed) with an abnormally acute sense of smell.
As a young man, he comes under the tutelage of Baldini (Hoffman), a once-great perfumer, whom he dazzles by his ability to knock up exquisite scents with the instinctive panache of a cocktail mixer. But Baldini’s patronage is not enough for the obsessive dreams of Grenouille, who is intent on capturing definitively the smell of everything and anything – from metal to dead cats to (eventually) people.
Grenouille heads south to Grasse in Provence, where he starts murdering young women with an aim to distilling the perfect scent. His ultimate victim seems fated to be the gorgeous, tres fragrant Laura (Hurd-Wood), daughter of merchant Richis (Rickman).
Grenouille finally looks set to face justice, but it’s then that he uncorks his final perfume with sexually spectacular results, capping the film in an audacious tableau that is likely to stand as the film’s great claim to posterity.
Tykwer, once enfant terrible of new German cinema, comfortably settles into his new role as a confident orchestrator of elaborate spectacle. Fans of Run Lola Run will be surprised to see how much Perfume at times resembles a traditional stately costume drama, complete with an often lethargic pace that stretches its running time excessively (Suskind’s tightly-narrated fable runs to around 260 pages in its Penguin edition).
The film makes most of an impression in the Paris-set first hour, particularly with a sequence on Grenouille’s birth that briskly and unnervingly establishes the sheer squalor of the 18th-century city.
Things slow down for the spell in Baldini’s shop, where the interior scenes feel theatrical rather than cinematic, and where the narrative holds back to make space for Dustin Hoffman’s extravagant performance. Powdered and wigged to resemble Mr Punch, Hoffman plays Baldini for grotesque comedy, with a distracting Italo-Brooklyn accent, and his camp flamboyance rather overpowers the film. Yet when he drops out of the picture - about an hour in through a magnificent CG sight gag - Perfume suddenly feels a lot less fun.
Tykwer does not quite work out how best to use Ben Whishaw, whose saturnine, punky demeanour is certainly unsettling, but who is never quite the centre of proceedings. One of the problems is how to dramatise a character who is 100% obsession and whose being revolves entirely around the olfactory (and who, what’s more, barely speaks). As the murder theme takes over in the second half, so Grenouille becomes a period precursor of the modern movie line of fetishistic serial killers, rather than the elemental figure he appears in Suskind’s magic-realist novel.
To give the film the ironic, fable-like tone it requires, Hurt’s elegantly laconic narration – as in Lars Von Trier’s Manderlay and Dogville – is called on to do a little more work than it ideally might have.