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Smell-O-Vision: Perfume

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Trailer for "Perfume"

If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, as someone cleverer than I once remarked, then what is making a movie about smells like? Anyone who answered “Smells like teen spirit” is (probably accidentally) in the right ballpark, as the 1985 novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer was a favorite of Kurt Cobain’s.

A cult hit in Europe, the book about an 18th-century orphan so obsessed with the desire to preserve the beauty of smells that he is driven to murder was long considered unfilmable. Whether the film that has in fact been made of it by Germany’s Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) proves or disproves that point, I will leave to those who have read the book.

On its own merits, this overstuffed movie is alternately enjoyably lurid and preposterously overblown, variously recalling the oeuvres of Peter Greenaway and Tim Burton, an olfactory Amadeus and a mega-budgeted remake of Roger Corman’s skid row classic A Bucket of Blood. Exhausted yet? Wait until you see the film.

Relative newcomer Ben Whishaw stars as Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born under the stalls of a Parisian fishmarket and raised in so vile a fashion that we’re compelled to empathize with him, at least so long as he is more sinned against than sinning. Born with an exaggerated sensitivity to odors, he is so overwhelmed by his first nasal experience of beauty that he becomes obsessed with recreating it so that he can re-enjoy it at will. To this end he apprentices himself to a washed-up perfume maker (Dustin Hoffman, giving the kind of over-the-top performance that only he can get away with) before striking out on his own. All well and good, except that the smell he so longs to capture is that of a beautiful woman, and the method he devises to do that turns him into a French variant on Jack the Ripper.

Aside from the general theme of the frustration of all artists in attempting to capture something so transitory as beauty, I couldn’t begin to say what Tykwer is trying to get at here. He does appear to be having a jolly good time, making the most of an apparently unlimited budget that allowed him to take over a neighborhood in Spain and fill it several feet deep with dead fish, or to stage a gynormous orgy scene that must have Greenaway gnashing his teeth in envy. Perfume gets by for most of its first half on sheer brio, losing steam as it turns into a standardized serial killer movie but bouncing back with a final flourish that some audiences will find enchanting, others laughable.