'Perfume: The Story of a Murderer' Movie Review: Smelling Through Your Eyes and Ears

"Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" is a deliciously perverse tale. It is a strange but beguiling film with rhapsodic language and intoxicating imagination. A sensory prose adapted from Patrick Suskind's best-selling novel "Das Parfum," it transforms into a distinctly bold and provocative work on the big screen courtesy of filmmaker extraordinaire Tom Tykwer (also the man behind "Run Lola Run" and "Heaven").

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The film stirs your imagination with its bizarre, macabre fantasy. The vivid visuals and astounding music makes you practically smell many of the scenes, as if your eyes and ears turn into noses. It brings you as close as cinematically possible to capturing an elusive sense from the novel's magical, sensory gift. The way Tykwer treats the film makes it more like having aromatherapy oils and bath salts applied to your cinematic experience.

As an allegorical tale about the pursuit of perfection in a violent, brutish world, "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" weaves a sensual spell of extraordinary delicacy to hold your interest for more than 2.5 hours of visual panache in a kinky fairytale form. Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw), born with a superior olfactory sense, a victim of a passion larger and more powerful than he can handle, walks an irrevocable course in his search for the ultimate scent and preserving it.

The story conveys the complicated world of smells and the world of Grenouille being a form of study about a troubled human being whose amorality makes him a potential Messiah, monster, or menace to humanity.

"Perfume" has great moments of beauty and audacity. It is another compelling work from Tykwer. This period story is quite an unusual choice for a film adaptation with such a broad scale of theme to be recreated into a two-hour something audio-visual offer. Yet, the filmmaker's treatment in transforming the book into moving picture effectively utilizes adept magic realism that delights the senses in a different way a typical story about the life of a murderer would be.

Tykwer achieves one of those rarities with a film adaptation creating the kind of magic that mostly reads better on page than on screen. He recreates the inner universe that his characters inhabit, while putting drops of melodramatic beauty out of the material. His solid direction conveys the sensuality of smell via captivating images and music.

The operatic and hand-painted heights of life and death culminating in a ludicrous orgy scene don't gratuitously portray sex and violence the way many films get accused of. Its unconventionality becomes its key strength to counter-attack the exploitation issues. Here, Grenouille's subjective universe seems, if not normal, somehow perversely seductive with the infusion of numerous suspenseful and creepy scenes showing him at work and the cause and effect results of his acts.

The film brings out many universal issues in such a creative style. This cinematic adaptation clearly deals with a certain form of obsession and the vicious observation of human limitations. It marks various perceptions and different interpretations to the viewers. Just like in the case of Grenouille, its footprint shows a particular issue on how art can be worth any human cost.

It is quite difficult to imagine a movie capturing the texture of its remarkable and elusive characters, but the intriguing performance by newcomer Whishaw as a man whose phenomenal sense of smell takes a dark turn is oddly charismatic. His cipher of a performance makes the despicable Grenouille a complex and sympathetic antihero who thinks of nothing more than the alternative ingredients to his perfumes for him to create olfactory perfection. He is presented not as a mere lunatic, but as a guy who just needs to kill women plainly for his scent experiments -- keeping him right on the edge of being a monster and a genius.

Whishaw succeeds in making the repulsive protagonist thoroughly repulsive by lending weight to the character with less dialogue and more distinct moves and expressions. All these convey the profound effects of his supersensitive nose. Being the central character of the film, no amount of artifice can cover up such a need for a masterful performance. The supporting characters render great contribution to creating the colorful backdrop of 18th century France where the irony of smells are found in various places.

The magic realism could have not worked if not for the ensemble delivering effectively for the film. From the compelling narration of John Hurt and the enticing portrayal of beauty and innocence by Rachel Hurd-Wood to the ambitious and opportunistic moments of Dustin Hoffman and the protective father role of Alan Rickman, everyone keeps up with the right caliber of what can be called as an effective ensemble performance.

The unique tone of "Perfume" makes it a fairytale about the art, the senses, and a brilliant sociopath victimized by passion and victimizing with it. As a period film about a serial killer without having to show blood and wild action scenes, "Perfume" pushes the envelope of an art film and gives the irony of scents a splendid presentation.

Slow but suspense-filled as it is, Tykwer manages the absurdity of his subject matter well with such boldness and artistry. The film's spectacle, along with its wicked sense of humor and the ironies of its aesthetic presentation, are its main source of appeal. From its laborious start to its breathtaking and whirlwind finish, it taps the human senses to a point that the audience tends to feel having a sort of consummate magic after watching the film.

From its artistic illustrations of scents, to its horrific slums, to its depiction of graphic mass sexuality, the film is both mesmerizing and disturbing to watch. The music by Reinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek, and Tom Tykwer adds a great amount of power to support the film's intentions. The cinematography by Frank Griebe stunningly renders the elegant production design by Uli Hanisch and art direction by Hucky Hornberger. The film editing by Alexander Berner thoroughly delivers the cinematic elements needed to make the film a unified feast for the senses.

This uniquely magical piece succeeds reasonably well in achieving what many say is hard to utilize in the scope of cinema: conveying the world of scent and the significant scope of the sense of smell. With a good script courtesy of Andrew Birkin, Bernd Eichinger, and Tom Tykwer, and a brilliantly direction by Tykwer, the journey and alienation of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille turn into a combination of an elegant, unpleasant, intriguing, and disturbing cinematic opus.

In wilder terms, the film is like an addict consumed by drugs; and it shares a certain aspect of it to the audience. It's more like "smell it with your eyes..."