Perfume the Story of a Murderer Read by Sean Barrett
Not only does "Perfume" seem impossible to film, it must have been amost impossible for Patrick Suskind to write. How practice you describe the ineffable enigma of a olfactory property in words? The audiobook, read by Sean Barrett, is the all-time audio performance I take e'er heard; he snuffles and sniffles his manner to greatness and you lot near believe he is inhaling elation, or the essence of a stone. I one time most destroyed a dinner party by putting it on for "5 minutes," after which nobody wanted to stop listening.
Patrick Suskind's famous novel involves a twisted petty foundling whose fishwife mother casually births him while chopping off cod heads. He falls neglected into the stinking charnel house that was Paris 300 years ago, and is nearly thrown out with the refuse. Only Grenouille grows into a grim, taciturn survivor (Ben Whishaw), who possesses two extraordinary qualities: he has the most acute sense of smell in the world, and has absolutely no odour of his own.
This last attribute is ascribed by legend to the spawn of the devil, but the picture "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" makes no mention of this possibility, wisely limiting itself to vile if unnamed evil. Grenouille grows upwards as a tanner, voluptuously inhaling the globe'south smells, and eventually talks himself into an apprenticeship with Baldini (Dustin Hoffman), a master perfumer, at present past his prime number, whose shop is on an overcrowded medieval bridge on the Seine.
Mention of the bridge evokes the genius with which director Tom Tykwer ("Run Lola Run") evokes a medieval globe of gross vices, all-pervading stinks and crude appetites. In this world, perfume is similar the passage of an angel -- some people think, literally. Grenouille effortlessly invents perfect perfumes, just his appetite runs deeper; he wants to distill the essence of copper, rock and beauty itself. In pursuit of this terminal ideal he becomes a gruesome murderer.
Baldini tells him the world middle of the perfume art is in Grasse, in Southern France, and then he walks there. I was there once myself, during the Cannes festival, and at Sandra Schulberg's villa met les nez de Grasse, "the noses of Grasse," the men whose tastes enforce the standards of a global industry. They sat dressed in smashing business suits around a table bearing a cheese, which they regarded with an involvement I could only imagine. On the lawn, immature folk frolicked on bed sheets strewn with rose petals. You actually must try it sometime.
It is in the nature of creatures like Grenouille (I suppose) that they have no friends. Indeed he has few conversations, and they are rudimentary. His life, as it must be, is nigh entirely interior, and so Twyker provides a narrator (John Hurt) to establish sure events and facts. Fifty-fifty then, the film is essentially visual, not spoken, and does a remarkable job of establishing Grenouille and his world. Nosotros can never really understand him, but we and cannot tear our eyes abroad.
"Perfume" begins in the stink of the gutter and remains nighttime and brooding. To rob a person of his smell is cruel enough, simply the style information technology is done in this story is truly macabre. Still it tin be said that Grenouille is driven by the conditions of his life and the nature of his spirit. Also, of class, that he may indeed be the devil's spawn.
This is a dark, dark, dark film, focused on an obsession and then complete and lonely it shuts out all other human feel. You lot may not savour it, but yous will not stop watching it, in horror and fascination. Whishaw succeeds in giving u.s. no hint of his character save a deep savage demand. And Dustin Hoffman produces a quirky old master whose life is also governed by perfume, if more positively. Hoffman reminds united states of america here over again, as in "Stranger Than Fiction," what a detailed and fascinating character actor he is, able to bring to the story of Grenouille precisely what humor and humanity it needs, and and then tactfully leaving information technology at that. Even his exit is nicely timed.
Why I love this story, I do not know. Why I have read the book twice and given away a dozen copies of the audiobook, I cannot explain. There is goose egg fun about the story, except the way it ventures so fearlessly down one limited, terrifying, seductive dead end, and finds in that location a solution both sublime and horrifying. It took imagination to tell it, courage to film it, thought to act it, and from the audition information technology requires a brave curiosity about the peculiarity of obsession.
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert was the motion-picture show critic of the Chicago Dominicus-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
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Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2007)
147 minutes
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