Perfume – The Story Of A Murderer (DVD-Video)
Picture:
C+ Sound: B- Extras: D Feature: D
When it
first arrived as a book back in 1985, Patrick Suskind’s Perfume – The Story Of A Murderer was a big hit worldwide,
published like crazy and soon after, interest in making it a film
surfaced. At one point, Stanley Kubrick
was even interested, but the author would not allow anyone to get it and
Kubrick moved on to other work. Over two
decades later, the rights finally were sold and Run Lola Run director Tom Tykwer was hired to helm the film.
A hit in
Europe and bomb in the U.S., the story centers on the birth, life and journey
of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a young boy born as a baby into poverty as well as
with the gift of exceptional smell. The
gift stays with him his whole life and eventually becomes obsessed with the
idea of smell and keeping it. The
journey includes meeting an expert on the subject (Dustin Hoffman) and his
obsession leading to murder.
The book
can be frustrating, can be problematic, but is an original and very, very
dark. I was hoping Tykwer could really
handle the material with the proper weight of the mortality and existential
angst of the book, but he (who also co-wrote the screenplay) manages to botch
the entire film by trying to make it whimsical and lightweight. That makes its 147 minutes drag like crazy
and even Alan Rickman cannot save its final reels. Ben Whishaw is good as Grenouille well, but
this becomes more fantasy than the Horror the book offered. If anything, you could call this pathetically
anti-Kubrickian in its inability to deal with human sexuality and make
everything a light joke.
Making
sure I did not miss anything, I dug out my copy of the book and read it again
to see if he found something in the pages I missed. No. I
was correct. He disemboweled the darker
layers of the book for some pretentious, illicit appeal to “art’ or the like and
the result is a mess. In the end, it
later reminded me of Hannibal Rising
(reviewed elsewhere on this site) when I saw that. Both had young killers in Europe (with gutted
color filming?!?) we are supposed to sympathize with, yet the story gives us
zero reason to be interested. In both cases,
the films go off into directions that are pointless and the resulting missed
opportunities offer a list of not to make a film. Ultimately, Perfume the movie is like a fly-by-night fragrance with a celebrity
name that smells like insecticide, versus the book, with a rich, original
smell. Too bad Kubrick did not make this
one.
The
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image is soft and does not do total justice to
the good work Director of Photography Frank Griebe managed to get in, though
there is some bad digital work more often than you’d think. Depth is also an issue and the desaturated
colors are rendered oddly and inconsistently here. The Dolby Digital 5.1 ands Dolby 2.0 Stereo mix
are not always lively, but has unique ambience and the mixers took aural
advantage of the unusual narrative situation.
The music is mixed (Tykwer co-composed it) and John Hurt’s narration
never gels despite his best efforts. The
only extra is a making of featurette.
- Nicholas Sheffo
