Whiffed

Perfume misses by a nose.

by Cindy Fuchs

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer begins in a prison cell. Alone in the shadows, young killer Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw) awaits his execution. When guards escort him roughly to the open-air gallows, the crowd cheers, both enthusiastic and repulsed. Grenouille remains impassive, looking at once fragile and resolute. Described by the film's narrator (John Hurt) as "one of the most gifted and abominable personages of his day," Grenouille appears strange and utterly ordinary, an embodiment of his era's excessive, narcissistic desire.

Tom Tykwer's film, adapted from Patrick Süskind's 1985 novel, goes on to detail that desire, beginning with the moment of Grenouille's birth in a filthy Parisian fish market, circa 1783, where, the narrator observes, "there reigned a stench barely conceivable." The boy's mother is a horror, too, a vendor who goes into labor at her stand ("the most putrid spot in the kingdom"), drops to her knees and delivers her baby. Within minutes, the child is nearly lost among the rest of the day's detritus, just so much garbage until he determines to survive, crying out amid pig guts, rats and maggots, persisting despite his mama's efforts to murder him.

Thus born into abjection, the child is extra doomed by his particular gift, an acute and relentless sense of smell, termed here an especial appreciation of "the fleeting realm of scent." The setup doesn't exactly motivate or explain what comes after, namely, Grenouille's grisly pursuit of perfection in the form of smell, but it does provide the novel and film's focus on the use of words and images to indicate smell.

SCENTLESS APPRENTICE: Ben Whishaw as Perfume's odor-obsessed killer.

It's a good trick, translating one sensory experience into the terms of another — maybe even a too-clever, self-absorbed kind of exercise. But where the novel is darkly, obviously sarcastic, the film is merely obvious. Extending the story of appropriation beyond formal concerns, it reveals and seems to revel in the immorality and ugliness of such self-absorption. For Grenouille is part artist, part scientist and part monster, an apparently odorless entity who seeks to capture what he understands to be beauty, to distill and possess the perfect scent.

It's hardly surprising that this scent is drawn from beautiful women. Emerging from an orphanage-workhouse to pursue his fortune, Grenouille discovers his calling, seemingly by accident. Attracted by a red-haired plum seller (Karoline Herfurth), he follows her into an alley, where, like Lenny in Of Mice and Men, he almost helplessly kills her, finding in her corpse something close to the perfect smell. With distressingly close, mobile frames showing her pale belly and dead nipples — along with Grenouille's yuckily shallow breathing — the scene suggests he's also pleasured sexually (however much the narrator may protest the boy is asexual) and that his subsequent efforts to repeat this experience emerge from a particularly grim onanistic longing.

Uncaught following this first murder, Grenouille gets a job. He impresses a has-been perfume maker, Giuseppe Baldini (Dustin Hoffman, whose "Italian" accent is a terrible joke), with his accuracy. The scene runs like a game, where the boy names scents with a comic speed and efficiency. From his new master, he learns how to distill aromas, a mechanical process he applies to his own recipe, the essences of 12 virgins and a prostitute. After moving to Grasse ("the promised land of perfume"), Grenouille — according to his narrator — sees the women's necessary deaths as incidental: He treats the bodies with animal fat, scrapes off the then-odorous waxiness and cooks it down into a teeny vial's worth of perfume. But as the leftover bodies accumulate in the streets, locals feel requisite alarm.

And with that, a seeming rivalry is established, for a minute. Almost as soon as the wealthy amateur sleuth Antoine Richis (Alan Rickman) begins to wonder about the mind of the criminal, his own daughter, the milky-complexioned Laura (Rachel Hurd-Wood), becomes Grenouille's ideal, ostensibly final object. It's not a little unnerving that this object is sensationally redheaded, like a prepunk Lola (still Tykwer's most famous elusive female character) and, moreover, that she is subjected to terrible abuse, despite and probably because of her father's watchfulness. Frequently posed in windows or door frames, at one point scared by shadows she sees in a hedge maze, at others headstrong and spunky, she's just the sort of romantic girl victim that makes movie monsters' hearts go pit-a-pat.

But Perfume abandons this last girl in favor of its own fixation, the terminally banal Grenouille. Even as the film invites your sympathy for him, or at least some interest, he retreats into bland predictability, perhaps especially during the sex orgy that serves as the film's sensational but oddly unmoving set piece. Grenouille's obsession is, in the end, much like that of the less ornately literary killers who precede him, producing desperately conventional spectacles of dead girls.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Directed by Tom TykwerA Paramount releaseOpens Friday at Ritz Five