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entertaining u newspaper: your weekly guide to entertainment
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by rick grant rickgrant01@comcast.net
B+ Rated R 147 min
Could a perfume be created that is so powerful in its olfactory perfection that it would cause people to become intoxicated by its essence of spiritual love? This was the question Patrick Suskind’s protagonist, Jean-Batiste Grenouille asked himself in Suskind’s epic novel. Writer/director, Tom Tykwer masterfully adapted Suskind’s novel into a shocking screen scenario.
Set in France, circa 1800s, the story chronicles Jean-Baptiste’s (Ben Whishaw) bizarre journey to create the holy grail of perfumes, which contained the very essence of ethereal beauty. To smell it would be like crossing over into heaven and feeling the love of God.
Jean-Baptiste was born to a fish seller in the filth of her workplace. His mother left the baby to die, but, despite all odds, he breathed and lived. Consequently, she was arrested and immediately hanged. The newborn was sent to a hellish, overcrowded orphanage where he was abused. The child grew up as a slave and was sold to a cruel task-master at a tannery. There he labored 18 hours a day for room and board. One day, he is sent to Paris with the tannery’s goods. This was the turning point for Jean-Baptiste.
During Jean-Baptiste’s childhood, he discovered his extraordinary olfactory ability. In his mind, he had catalogued his environment into a broad spectrum of scents. His olfactory genius was to making perfume, as Einstein was to mathematics and physics. Eventually, Jean-Baptiste escaped his brutal master and traveled to Grasse, France’s perfume capital. He seeks out France’s most famous perfumer, Giueseppe Balding (Dustin Hoffman). At first, Guieseppe refused to take Jean-Baptiste as an apprentice. However, Jean-Baptiste amazed Giueseppe with his ability to create perfumes from memory without using formulas.
After a short apprenticeship with Guieseppe, Jean-Baptiste strikes out on his own. He becomes obsessed with creating the magnum opus of perfumes. He sees beautiful women and he is entranced by their natural odor. His idea is to obtain their essence from their skin and hair by smearing animal fat on their hair and body, then scrapping it off -- brewing the mixture with added ingredients of his invention. The only problem was: He can’t find anyone willing to go through this disgusting procedure, even prostitutes. So, when he accidentally kills a beautiful woman, it starts his serial killing spree to gain enough essence of female beauty to create his crowing glory.
In his search for the most beautiful woman in the world, Jean-Baptiste he meets his muse, Laura (Rachel Hurd-Wood) the stunning daughter of a prominent townsman, Antoine Richis (Alan Rickman). Richis is trying to get people to realize there is a serial killer in their midst. He is scared for his daughter, and rightly so–Jean-Baptiste has been stalking her. So he takes extraordinary security measures and secrets Laura away in a remote country castle. Ah, but Jean-Baptiste uses his nose to find her scent–like a bloodhound. She is his last ingredient of his peace de resistance of perfumes.
Tykwer goes to extremes to portray the miserable conditions of Paris and Grasse during that time, with dirt and horse feces everywhere. The people rarely bathed and had rotten teeth. In this cacophony of detritus, Jean-Baptiste’s genius created something of such delicate beauty no one could resist its spell. Yet, his killing spree was escalating, as the naked bodies of his victims were found in the open, posed. His loveless childhood created a sociopath with no emotional feeling. His quest for the ultimate perfume consumed his time, until he created it. Then he still couldn’t feel the emotions that others felt. He could control people by releasing the scent–they kneeled at his feet and called him an angel. But he couldn’t achieve what he longed for the most–a soul. The quest for creating his God-like perfume was more gratifying than its completion. The irony was: He had captured the elixir of human love in a bottle, but he couldn’t feel its effect.
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