There are a million ways that a film adaptation of “”Perfume: The Story of a Murderer”” could have gone wrong. Its main character, born and abandoned on the slimy floor of Paris’ downtown fish market, is blessed (and cursed) with the keenest of noses – no butcher’s waste pile nor far-off mud puddle goes undetected – but without a scent of his own. He grows up a discarded orphan until discovering the enchantment of perfumery, and sets out to preserve the most rapturous scent of all: a young woman at the onset of adulthood. The historical fable is written with stone-cold precision, never letting sticky morality break its bone-chilling spell, telling a serial murderer’s fascinating account without the sympathy or laid-out universalities that are difficult to avoid in motion picture.
Knowing this, Patrick Suskind, German author of the 1985 bestselling novel, steadfastly ignored 20-plus years of filmmakers knocking at his door – including Kubrick, Scorsese and Burton – begging for the rights to bring his story to the big screen. After going so far as to write a play about the unshakable attempts of friend and movie producer Bernd Eichinger to win the rights to the novel, however, the “”Perfume”” author finally caved.
Still, many considered the twisted little story, which relies heavily on dark literary undertones and the creepy authenticity of long-since-renovated 18th-century Parisian streets, unfilmable – even American master Stanley Kubrick changed his mind after expressing interest in the project. Fortunately, such was not the case for “”Run Lola Run”” director Tom Tykwer, who immediately dove into the scriptwriting, score-composing and casting processes. His ambitious all-involvement has transformed an impossible film – though not without humble flaw – into a feverish yet strikingly lucid daydream for the senses that impressively avoids many spoiling banalities of page-to-screen conversion.
Take, for example, the film’s climax and most mesmerizing scene, in which hundreds of swarming, unbathed French commoners and bourgeois alike gather in the town center for a public execution of the repulsive creature (Jean-Baptiste Grenouille) who has murdered 13 of Grasse’s loveliest young virgins. After a single dab of the girls’ combined essence on his wrist, though, the impassioned mob is rendered stupid – and overwhelmingly horny. They proceed to strip themselves and each other of all (painstakingly sullied) costume, engaging in a unified writhing never before paralleled in the history of mass cinematic orgies.
“”It’s quite an overwhelming task for even a good actor,”” Tykwer said. “”And then we needed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people to deliver that.”” He hired the Catalonian troupe La Fura dels Baus for the task (much of the film was staged in Barcelona), requiring that each of the roughly 800 dancers read the book and rehearse until the complex character transition was fully understood.
Ben Whishaw, cast in a perfect lead alongside Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman, is undoubtedly the axel around which “”Perfume”” spins. After an extensive search for the right Grenouille, Tykwer discovered Whishaw playing Hamlet at London’s Old Vic Theater. “”There was already something about him that I loved; he was taking this classical character and doing something with it that was so modern, and so contemporary and so fresh,”” he said. “”I wanted the film to be believable in the period but still feel as if we are part of it, as if we were thrown into that period in a time machine and we can just wander around.””
The film is unavoidably over-literal, as visuals never leave much room for imagination. The ridiculous plot, which worked in Suskind’s intricately woven story of human loneliness, is cringingly revealed when stripped of haunting prose. But Tykwer approaches this inevitability with gusto, and strings a sequence of images so perfectly that – all absurdity aside – a beautiful story has emerged.
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