Review: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006), Tom Tykwer

Searching for the scent of a woman.

It’s a good thing that books sometimes are adapted to movies. One cannot read everything and in a bit more than two hours, one gets to know the story. This one was written by Patrick Süskind in 1985 and is about a special boy, called Jean-Bapiste Grenouille, fascinated by scents.

I wonder if one misses a lot by not reading the book. Sometimes a movie even brings something more. This is definitely so when this movie starts and we see the birth of the boy in a dirty suburb in Paris in 1738. His mother is selling fish on a market and gives birth under the table with fish and then immediately tries to forget it.

The voice-over says that usually such a baby is transported at the end of the day with all the other fish and meat waste, but this boy wants to survive. The offence of the mother is detected, because the boy cries. She is hung and the boy is brought to an orphants home. The other boys don’t like him because he has no scent. The director of the home sells him to a tanner.

One day he brings skins into town and gets in the spell of all the scents, especially of a young and beautiful girl with red hair, selling yellow plums. He follows her and kills her by accident in order to get to know her scent. Since he doesn’t know how to preserve it, he askes a famous perfumier to help him destillate scents. By making a special perfume he convinces the perfumier that he is very talented.

Because he wants to learn other ways to preserve scents, the perfumier sents him to Grasse. There he works in a laboratory. One evening he kills a girl and puts her dead body instead of flowers in the big reservoir, but the experiment fails. Then he starts to put grease on the bodies of the young girl which he kills, and scrapes the grease off the bodies in order to make the scent.

The inhabitants start to fear the murderer of all young woman in their town. Jean Baptiste hides himself and the people hear someone from Grenoble was to blame. When the murdering continues, the father of the most beautiful Laure flights with her out of town but Jean Baptiste finds her and kills her.

While preserving her scent in a little bottle, he is cauhgt. When he is brought to the center square of the town to be killed in front of the inhabitants, he makes the audience crazy with the divine smell out of the little bottle. An erotic orgy starts on the square. Of course that doesn’t last long, but long enough for Jean Baptiste to escape. He returns to Paris to his homeground and feels sad that his plan hasn't succeeeded. He pours the scent out of the bottle over his body, which attracts all kinds of poor people and is buried by them.

Till so far a short and maybe simplified contest of this wonderful story, which is represented in these pictures too dramatic and over the top sometimes. It is not plausible that Jean Baptiste knows exactly how to make a certain perfume when he sees the old perfumier.

Unfortunately the movie is not in French, but in English. It was especially annoying to hear the father of Laure speak.

The end of the movie is sentimental and I guess that reading the book would have created better images.