Film Blog: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

For the man who directed one of my favorite movies, Run Lola Run, Tom Tykwer really hit bottom on this one. The magic and sweetness that permeate even the original book seemed to be stripped away for the sake of telling the story, fact for fact, and forgetting the aesthetic the author of the novel, Patrick Suskind, so cleverly creates on the page. My first problem is that nearly the first quarter of the movie is in third person narration, almost like it is being read from the book. The images are beautiful, the characters appropriately costumed with rags or slightly fancy rags and yellow teeth to show that we really are in 18th century France. But as I said before, the magic is missing. We have no idea who the narrator is. The main character (Jean-Baptiste played by Ben Whishaw) rarely speaks – doesn’t for at least the first thirty minutes. This alone makes him into a bit of an outcast and potential threat, but not in a good way. Not in any endearing way that makes me sympathize with him. In addition, of all the facts Tykwer took so faithfully from Suskind’s story, the representation of Jean-Baptiste’s sickness, which is the book is anthrax, is nearly blown over and forgotten. Certainly his subsequent disfiguration from his miraculous survival is not even broached. I can only assume some producer insisted that the character keep his looks – they certainly went to a lot of trouble to cast a gorgeous young man. But for me, this only took away from his likeability. Seeing a youthful, healthy man killing young women (who could probably get them alive) is not the same as seeing a bitter, disfigured young man killing the women he could never have.

My interest did pick up about halfway through the movie, when the characters actually started speaking their own lines instead of being led by the God Voice of the Narrator. But it still seemed like too much ‘fact’ was jammed in, at the expense of the actual feeling of this amazing set of events. The only part that started to capture some of the magic I remember from reading the book was near the end, when Jean-Baptiste steps on the chopping block and wins over the village with the resulting orgy. But without this previously being entrenched in the aesthetic of the film, it seemed kind of shocking and out of place. And then the Narrator steps in to tie up the loose ends, which, especially at this point, I think could have been done just as effectively with no talking, just by Tykwer trusting the images he already has on the screen.