Tom Tykwer (2006)
It was both interesting and disappointing to see the first name on the screenplay – Andrew Birkin, author of the superb late 1970s BBC mini-series The Lost Boys (and the subsequent book J M Barrie and the Lost Boys). Birkin, who shares the writing credit for Perfume with Tom Tykwer and the producer Bernd Eichinger, never gets close to a satisfying dramatisation of the famous Patrick Suskind novel, published in 1985. For what feels like a good twenty minutes or more, the film is merely voiceover narration (by John Hurt), accompanied by illustrations of the words being spoken. The images are frequently arresting but the film is motorless and fails, once the voiceover has been largely jettisoned, to develop any other kind of narrative line. The murderer of the title is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a young man who has a superhuman sense of smell (but is himself odourless). In a quest for the perfect scent, he kills virgins, and tries to preserve their scent from their newly dead bodies. You might think from that synopsis that Perfume had the makings of a distinctive, entertaining horror film but Suskind, if Wikipedia is to be believed, had larger ambitions for the novel, which is about ‘identity, communication and the morality of the human spirit’. It appears that Tykwer, Birkin and Eichinger wanted to make a movie of similar pretension; perhaps it was respect for the original that paralysed their adaptation.
Photographed by Frank Griebe, Perfume, set in eighteenth-century France in the town of Grasse, is never less than remarkable to look at. The tones and textures are rich and the lighting gives them an extraordinary clarity (even though I was watching the film on television). If I knew more about art history I expect I could have seen particular artists and their works in many of the compositions: as it is, I couldn’t do more than notice that, for example, the corpse of Grenouille’s first victim evokes art gallery images of cadavers – thanks to the expertly differentiated flesh tones and the anatomical objectivity of the camera. But although the visuals are impressive, their aestheticising effect reinforces the emotional anonymity of Perfume – except for a single early sequence. The film opens with the protagonist’s being sentenced to death; Tykwer then goes into one long biographical flashback, starting with Grenouille’s birth in the street market where his mother works. A montage of severed fish and animal parts incorporates shots of the bloodied newborn and links him with these other damaged organisms. Unlike most of what follows, these images have a pungent, disgusting force that communicates itself almost odorously. I’ve not read the book but I guess its power may depend considerably on Suskind’s making the reader experience the olfactory. This screen adaptation demonstrates, among other things, that film struggles to realise smells the way that prose can.
Playing the perfumier Giuseppe Baldini, Dustin Hoffman (with an amusingly imprecise accent) enlivens things briefly but Alan Rickman, as a rich man called Richis, who’s terrified that his daughter will be Grenouille’s next victim, is tedious – Rickman is surely one of the least paternal actors imaginable. As the Bishop of Grasse, David Calder is even worse. (Perfume is naff as historical drama and even worse in its occasional satirical moments, with the church predictably on the receiving end of the satire.) Sally says that Grenouille in the book, in spite of his amphibian name, is animal-like. Ben Whishaw, who plays him, suggests a faun but there’s no bestial quality and, as a serial killer, Whishaw isn’t remotely menacing. Nevertheless, he looks more effective than he sounds: his dimwit-Cockney street urchin voice suggests Lee Evans. By the time it ended, I’d come round to thinking Perfume might have been altogether better as a silent film. Tom Tykwer marshals the crowds well enough but their rhubarb-rhubarbing is pathetic and the acting in the smaller parts rarely extends beyond the broadly visual. In the absence of a narrative voice, a complete lack of spoken dialogue might have made sense of the exaggerated expressions of emotion of the supporting cast, and the overelaborate score by Tykwer, Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil. A silent treatment might, in other words, have helped the audience to feel more – perhaps even smell more.
8 April 2011
