Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer

Tom Twyker broke titillating new ground with his techno frenzied thriller Run, Lola, Run and now he returns in this truly bizarre twist on the genre. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a lush, stylized stab at what seems like slasher poetry. It chronicles the bizarrely tragic life of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille who is literally born into the gutter of 18th Century Paris and lives what appears to be a cursed life. His mother tries to kill him, gets killed, and everyone he meets thereafter either dies mysteriously or becomes his victim. He preys on beautiful young virgins in order to create the ultimate perfume and distill the essential scent of pure beauty. He’s born with such a powerful sense of smell that he becomes a ravenous monster in his attempts to make a smell that will satisfy his desires. He has no family, an inability to feel or love, and no scent of his own. Only the scents around him can satisfy his hungry nose. It’s an interesting way to create a villainous protagonist. Jean-Baptiste Grenouille has both an innocence and a heinousness about him that make him terrifying and heartbreaking. He’s as embodied and intense a monster as the horror genre has ever seen.

My fondness for this film is more in its ambition and its exciting originality than due to its execution or its enjoyableness. It’s involving and engaging for large portions of its excessive runtime but it falls into a sleepy monotony elsewhere. It’s based on a 1985 novel of the same name and it has the distinct feeling of something that’s been adapted. It feels shorthanded and never fully rendered, like reading the Cliff’s Notes rather than the genuine article. So much feels squished in and so little seems to come to a proper end. Twyker does get credit for making one of the most inventively odorous films ever produced. His images are so intoxicatingly vivid that you’d swear you smell them as Jean-Baptiste Grenouille does. There is no question that it is a visual pleasure in every way, but it wears thin and grows to an oh-so-ridiculous climax that despite all its artistic propensity cannot help but strike at least a slight note of strange confusion in even the most astute viewer.

The moral behind the madness deals with the viciousness entailed in producing true beauty and the power it bestows upon its possessor. Beautiful scents give Jean-Baptiste Grenouille the power to control even the most disdainful of people. Everyone succumbs to a scent as lovely as the one he has made from the bodies of 13 dead young girls. To call all of this ridiculous would be somewhat expected, but it’s a wicked allegory of beauty’s power in the world and an eerie piece of surrealism that toys with genre guidelines to the point that you’re caught up somewhere in a period/thriller/horror/art house/psychodrama and wondering how you got their in the first place. Its results are mixed, but it’s quite a ride.

Grade: B