Sleeper Cell: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006)

Apr 092010

“In eighteenth century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages. His story will be told here.” So begins the novel Das Parfum by the German author Patrick Suskind. The novel was thought to be an unfilmable story by directors such as Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton and Stanley Kubrick. And after reading the few chapters of the novel that I’ve read, I can say that director Tom Tykwer and his two co-screenwriters Andrew Birkin and Bernd Eichinger didn’t really manage to disprove them – a ton has been left out for the movie. But that’s not surprising considering that’s the way that just about all film adaptations go. So, forgiving that, Tom Tykwer, who earned his international fame with 1998′s Lola Rennt, manages instead to make a completely outstanding movie based mostly on Suskind’s characters.

This motion picture has been rated R for aberrant behavior involving nudity, violence, sexuality, and disturbing images. And it’s pretty damn aberrant. Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw, Layer Cake)¬†is spectacularly unceremoniously born in the most foul-smelling place in the world: the Paris fish market (and following the current trend in France-set movies, all the characters speak with British accents. I claim this land in the name of Hollywood and shall call it Frengland). His mother, who’d given birth to four stillborn children previous to this most recent pregnancy discards the baby fully expecting it to be her fifth failed birth, but is surprised to hear the baby crying from under her work bench. She flees the scene in a panic, and the fish market patrons mistake her actions for fleeing the scene of her supposed infanticide, and she is promptly hung for attempted murder. The baby Grenouille is sent to an orphanage, where we, along with his fellow orphans,¬† learn of his particular talent.

Grenouille has been blessed and cursed with the most well-developed sense of smell in the history of mankind. He spooks the other kids in the home by sniffing various rocks and dead rats, and goes about the business of slowly growing up under the minor persecutions that children always exact against the weirdos. After a few minutes of screentime, he’s a teenager, and the head matron of the orphanage sells Grenouille to a tanner as slave labor, after which she is murdered for the coins paid to her, continuing the theme of woe befalling those in Grenouille’s path of smelly destruction. Grenouille is strong and lives longer than expected and after turning seventeen is taken to the city for the first time where, expectedly, he encounters a whole new world of scents, and he greedily devours the new sensations.

Gerard Depardieu as Cyrano de Bergerac (left)

Top 5 Noses in Movie History (Haiku Edition):

5 – Mrs. Dalloway
would get flowers in The Hours:
Ms. Virgina Woolf

4 – Who knew a donkey
could be so horrifying?
Young Pinocchio

3 – Freedonia’s man
of the hour. Slappy Duck Soup’s
Rufus T. Firefly

2 – A little fire? Brooms
are straw too, right? Oz’s own
Western Wicked Witch

1 – You know what they say
about big noses: Monsieur
C. de Bergerac

This is where Tykwer really begins to shine as a director. Despite the clunky Frenglish John Hurt narration, the voice-over serves more of a purpose than to just give us the inner monologues of the major characters. Instead, the style of narration is more helpful like a third person narrator in a novel, and is hardly distracting (only distracting a little because it’s John Freaking Hurt). But as Grenouille goes all Toucan Sam and walks the streets of Paris with his eyes closed, Tykwer’s directorial style allows the audience to really imagine smelling everything along with him.

The super-saturated colors and clever foley work along with well-timed close-ups on whatever Grenouille is smelling that instant make your brain work to remember what it’s like to smell fresh coffee beans or a basin full of charcoal and even sweaty men in ratty wigs and dirty feet in a dirty puddle. The entire movie becomes a sensory experience with sound effects drawn out (such as uber-loud creaking leather chairs and super-scratchy quills pulling along rough parchment) and the accentuating of the set textures through clever lighting that make you feel the rough wood of basement doors and the rough unpolished iron of a distiller. All these techniques work to pull you into the movie and convince you that there really can’t be too many close-ups of an actor’s nose. The movie takes itself very seriously, and does enough stylistically to draw you into its universe.

Psyche Revived by Cupid‚Äôs Kiss

Amor and Psyche
Commissioned in 1787, Antonio Canova sculpted “Psyche Revived by Cupid‚Äôs Kiss” in the tradition of late eighteenth century neoclassical sculpture. The legend of Amor (or Cupid or Eros) and Psyche tells of a mortal, Psyche, who is so beautiful she incurs the wrath of Venus. Venus‚Äô plan of vengeance is to have Cupid, her son, use his arrows on Psyche while she sleeps so that when she awakes, she will fall in love with whatever disgusting creature they can find to put in her room. So, Cupid, invisible, sneaks into Psyche‚Äôs room and leans over her sleeping body to scratch her with an arrow, but before he can, she awakes and looks him right in the eyes. He‚Äôs startled and accidentally scratches himself with the arrow and falls in love with her. Venus gets pissed and places a curse on Psyche so she can‚Äôt find a husband. So Cupid gets pissed and refuses to shoot anyone with arrows. No one in the world is falling in love, and no babies are being born, so Venus acquiesces to her son and allows Cupid and Psyche to marry. Cupid then showers the earth with his arrows, and there is love all over the world. Hooray!

The story takes off when he smells a girl. This is really what elevates the movie beyond just a horror or a farce. The fact that the most intoxicating scent in the world is women is really just poetic. And melodramatic or not, you have to respect a movie going for the gold. As Grenouille tries to soak up her scent, she reacts … negatively, and to make a long story short, he accidentally kills her. The result of course is the dissipation of her scent. Realizing the ephemeral nature of scent, he sets out to learn how to preserve smells. His quest leads him to the Great Britalian perfumer Giuseppe Baldini (Dustin Hoffman, Ishtar, Sphere) who teaches him the perfuming trade after a demonstration of Grenouille’s skills. The current popular perfume is from Baldini’s rival and is called Amor and Psyche. Grenouille replicates the perfume and improves upon it, and earns the status of Journeyman from Master Baldini.

Grenouille

Ultimately, Grenouille travels to the small Frenglish city of Grasse to learn the secret of capturing smell. And it¬†is a horror. Grenouille is captivated by the smell of the women of Grasse and will stop at nothing to take it, and his tactics are actually horrifying. This is the kind of horror that you dream of – there are no silly animals jumping out of shadows and no long, tense shots with the badguy suddenly appearing in a mirror. Grenouille is a geniuinely terrifying predator. And the prize of his collection is the beautiful Laura (Rachel Hurd-Wood, An American Haunting) whom he must steal out from under the protective eyes of her father, Richis (Alan Rickman, Die Hard, Quigley Down Under). Tom Tykwer‚Äôs melodrama goes a little over the top at times (as in the Vicar‚Äôs pulpit speeches and of course the climactic mass orgy), but succeeds on the strength of its will. The movie and moviemakers believe so wholeheartedly that you can feel them reaching out to you from the movie screen. And because you see them believing so fiercely, it feels perfectly safe to believe right along with them.