Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

For years, it was thought that Patrick Suskind's novel was 'unfilmable' - how exactly can you make perfume interesting for the movie-going public and, more importantly, how would you convey smell in a strictly audio-visual medium? Well, fans of the book can rest easy, because Run, Lola, Run director Tom Tykwer has managed to do both in this intriguing, if uneven, film. The story centres on Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Whishaw), an orphan born with an acute sense of smell. After a hard upbringing, he manages to land a job for the once famous, but now down on his luck, Italian perfumer Baldini (Hoffman), and it is here that Grenouille's obsession with preserving human aromas takes a malevolent turn. When he moves to the perfume paradise of Grasse to further his studies, his murderous streak comes to fruition as Grenouille meticulously goes about perfecting the most beautiful scent the world has ever known. Tykwer draws you in from the cruel beginning and, apart from a muddled, unfocused middle section, never lets go until the end - and what a lovely ending it is. Tykwer employs John Hurt's voiceover intermittingly to stitch the plot together and to move the story along, and Hurt's soft tones juxtapose the sometimes brutal visuals. When Hurt isn't telling us what's happening, Tykwer lets the beautiful countryside around Grasse do the talking, and it's this union of ugly/beautiful that's the film's most disquieting aspect. Grenouille himself is a contradiction - Whishaw delivers a performance that is sympathetic yet callous, aloof yet warm, innocent yet lethal. With a script that requires Grenouille to utter only the bare minimum of words, Whishaw is reduced to using facial expressions, which is only connection we have with scent - and he is flawless in this. Slightly overlong and at times clunky, Perfume might not be to everyone's taste - but it's certainly worth a look-see.