More than twenty years after Patrick Süskind’s novel, Perfume, The Story of a Murderer, appeared in Germany, Tom Tykwer has brought it to the screen with remarkable fidelity and passion.
The screenplay is by Tykwer himself, Andrew Birkin (who worked on The Name of the Rose), and producer Bernd Eichinger. As far as possible the script seeks fidelity to Süskind’s book, although the film starts with Grenouille in prison, and ends not just with his being “devoured” by the people of the Orléanais, but also with a kind of sublimation as he imagines himself joined in love with his very first victim, the red-haired girl he stifled by night in Paris.
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, reticent if not quite inarticulate, survives every obstacle to become a perfumer’s apprentice in 18th century Paris. He yearns to capture scents as a lepidopterist does butterflies, and the distillation of female fragrance draws him like some gruesome Grail.
To add dramatic pace to the story, Tykwer and his fellow writers have introduced an off-screen narration at certain junctures – not overweening, as in Lars von Trier’s Dogville but akin to Kubrick’s use of the device in Barry Lyndon. John Hurt speaks this narration in exactly the right avuncular, conspiratorial tone. Where Süskind spends page after page describing odours and sensations, Tykwer urges his narrative forward so that the film becomes almost a thriller. His cinematic flair is shown in two compelling montage sequences – the first as the young Grenouille sniffs the foulness of the food market, and the second in Grasse, as one innocent girl after another is killed and panic consumes the local population.
Shot in English, Perfume could so easily have degenerated into a “Europudding”. That it does not is due to the quality of the acting, and to the impeccable instincts of a crew headed by Tykwer’s habitual cinematographer Frank Griebe. Ben Whishaw, already known as a talented Shakespearian actor in Britain, makes Grenouille a diabolically sympathetic creature, suggesting his unique sense of smell with a dilation of nostril here and a flutter of cheek there. Dustin Hoffman, often allowed by directors to over-act, contributes an excellent portrayal of the powdered, rouged, and be-wigged perfumer Baldini. He brings to life to the letter Süskind’s description of Baldini as he flourishes his lace handkerchiefs while analysing the scent, “Amor and Psyche.” Karoline Herfurth, as the girl who halves her plums while Grenouille steals up behind her, could not be better, her placid, Vermeer-like beauty at once sensual and tantalising. In fact, if the film surpasses the novel in any respect, it must be in its carnal realism – even down to the underarm hair of the prostitute Grenouille anoints and then kills in Grasse.
Working in ‘scope, emphasising colours like ochre and old gold, Griebe achieves a Rembrandtesque look throughout the film, compounded by intimate close-ups and fluid steadicam manoeuvres, often within a confined space. The camera hastens subjectively like a water-diviner in quest of specific aromas. When on occasion brightness is called for, it works wonderfully, as when we see a bare, bathed foot alighting on white marble tiles.
Uli Hanisch, who designed Tykwer’s two previous films, Heaven and The Princess and the Warrior, must know the novel by heart, for every flacon of scent, every item of furniture, every grunge-filled street reinforces the authentic atmosphere of 18th century France. His tour-de-force is that splendid moment when Baldini’s house collapses in the midst of the over-laden Pont-au-Change, and tumbles into the Seine. Stefan Busch’s sound design works in close alliance with the complex music score, written by Tykwer and his trusted colleagues Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek. At times almost symphonic in range, it’s performed by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Simon Rattle, and transcends the synthetic, synthesised scores prevailing in Hollywood. The piano and organ are used sparingly and to great effect.
The movie resonates with references beyond the pages of Süskind’s novel. In its focus on the grotesque it evokes the paintings of Brueghel and Bosch, while the sinister mood of Grimm’s Fairy Tales is always to hand (for example, as Grenouille’s head, seen from behind as a black, malignant shape, invades one corner of the screen). The macabre, obsessive nature of the crimes could belong to Hannibal Lecter, who, like Grenouille, revels in aromas and necrophilia. Or to the self-confessed cannibal Armin Meiwes. Or, indeed, to the Nazi doctors with their ghastly experiments on human flesh.
Not for nothing did the adaptation of Perfume take so long. Conjuring up scents and odours is much easier in the printed page than it is in the cinema, short of reviving Mike Todd Jr.’s 1960 process, “Smell-o-Vision.” Tykwer eschews such gimmicks, relying on a blend of music and imagery to communicate the world as it’s experienced by a man whose nose remains his primary sense. Often this strategy works, as in the stench-filled fish market, or when Grenouille first arrives in the lavender-clad fields of Provence. Sometimes it tips into bathos, as Baldini’s imagination is transported by a scent into a CGI world of flowers, from which a girl emerges who says, “I love you!”
The most arresting sequence of all occurs at the very conclusion of this forceful film when, to quote the novel, “the scheduled execution of one of the most abominable criminals of the age degenerated into the largest orgy the world had seen since the second century before Christ.” Tykwer and his crew stage a prodigious “love-in”, with perhaps inadvertent associations with Haight-Ashbury and the swinging Sixties. Those familiar with this passage in Süskind, which reads like a profane version of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, will recognise how difficult it is to render on screen – especially without resorting to CGI!. Ben Whishaw’s new-found arrogance contains just the hint of a Hitler as he stands tall on the scaffold and exerts his power over the huddled masses.
In some remarkable, and intensely disturbing way, Perfume is a love story, with all the heartaches and obsession associated with that sweet sickness. Perhaps one should paraphrase Wilde, in recognising that for Grenouille, “Each man loves the thing he kills,” rather than merely vice-versa. Tom Tykwer has responded to the challenge of Süskind’s masterpiece with a film that is by far the richest and most ambitious production he has created.
PETER COWIE
Peter Cowie is a film historian and author of some thirty books on the cinema, including studies of Ingmar Bergman, Orson Welles, and Francis Ford Coppola. He founded the annual International Film Guide, and was International Publishing Director of Variety for many years. He now serves as a consultant to the Berlinale as well as contributing commentaries to Criterion DVD’s. His latest book is Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever (Rizzoli, New York; Schirmer-Mosel, München).
