Perfume: Story of a Murderer(2007)***+

Seen on 8-9-2009 - HBO
Cast: Ben Wishaw (Grenoulle), Dustin Hoffman (Baldini)
Dir. : Tom Tykwer

Based on a novel by Patrick Suskind

The essence of things and people is in their smell or so it seems. This extraordinary film most obviously is meant to edify what heavenly experience the olfactory senses can bring to man and for this purpose it even resorts to surrealistic methods. For one completely deficient in this experience, this film comes as something of a revelation. It is appropriate that a film about perfume and their potential for volumptuous sensory experience should be located in France 300 years ago--a medieval world given to appetites of perfumes and wines.
Delivered casually and abandoned soon afterwards by his lowly fishwife mother, Grenoulle has little chance of survival, but the miracle happens. He grows up in the charnel house of an orphanage and later, sold into slavery, at a tannery. But he is endowed with two very unique gifts: he has such an acute sense of smell that he can smell things from miles and smell these countless things at the same time separately; also, he can not only quickly name them apart but retain them in his memory. He demonstrates his skills to a prosperous perfumer when he names the different ingradients of particular beguiling perfume; he even prepares it by effortlessly and rapidly taking from shelves a dozen different things, adding them in the right proportion and produce the exact quantity smelling exactly like difficult perfume in question. When the perfumer is convinced of his incredible gift of smell he buys him out of tannery's slavery and becomes rich for himself with his help.
However Grenoulle is a voluptuary and ambitious: he wants to distill and preserve the essense of things and beauty, especially of young beautiful women. He learns the basic process of distillation from Baldini and with papers from him gains entry into Grasse in Southern France which is considered to be world centre of perfume art.
Here he becomes a serial killer of young beautiful women whose smells he preserves in bottles of distilled liquids. The people become concerned that their daughters are disappearing one after another. Finally when he is apprehended and is prepared for gallows in the city centre something unbelievable happens: all the people of the town gathered there to watch his execution kneel to him in obiesance when waves his perfume scented handkerchief before them, the bishop including. On his return to Versailes the same thing happens--the crowd of gutterpeople gathered there, attracted by his divine scents, flock to him and choke him into total disappearance!
That way this is a fascinating movie.