Cinema - Perfume

Stanley Kubrick once had a good look at Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume, with an eye to making a movie out of it. He abandoned the project, declaring that the novel was ‘unfilmable’. Curious, this. If Suskind can evoke the imagination of powerful and seductive aromas in print, why can’t a director do so on the big screen? Ridley Scott considered it and pulled out. Ditto Tim Burton. Ditto Martin Scorcese. Enter young German film-maker Tom Tykwer.

Tykwer, the creator of the low-budget hit Run Lola Run, sets his movie in a grim 18th century urban world (notionally Paris, but filmed in London) which is beautifully ugly, and inhabited by gruesome eccentrics. His protagonist is a young man with zero personal body odour, but an incredibly acute sense of smell. The man, played by Ben Wishaw, has been brought up practically feral and is completely amoral. He goes to work for a parfumier (Dustin Hoffman), learns how to preserve scent, and moves to the town of Grasse. There he embarks on a gruesome project: to kill 13 virgins, and distil the essence of their scent to create one for himself, which is delectable to the senses of people around him. So far, so engrossing. The trouble is, the last third of Suskind’s novel goes much further into the realms of magic realism than the first section. And while the film needs a healthy dose of disbelief-suspension to start with, Twyker is too faithful to the novel’s final eccentricities, resulting in a conclusion which borders on the laughable. Starts well, but the ending stinks, in short. Pity that. DL