Director – Tom Tykwer, Screenplay – Andrew Birkin, Bernd Eichinger & Tom
Tykwer, Based on the Novel Das Perfume by Patrick Süsskind.
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is taken to be executed as a multiple murderer in the
town of Grasse. Grenouille was born in the Paris fishmarkets in 1738 and became
an orphan after his mother was hung for trying to kill him immediately after he
was born. As he grew up, Grenouille stood out from other children because of his
hyper-acute sense of smell. He was sold into servitude in a tannery but one day
was drawn away from his assignment by the richness of the smells on the streets.
He followed a girl, intoxicated by her aroma, and grabbed her, unwittingly
suffocating her when she cried out. He was heartbroken at not being able to
preserve her smell. While making a delivery to the Italian perfumer Giuseppe
Baldini, Grenouille amazed Baldini by being able to perfectly analyze and
recreate a rival’s popular perfume. And so Baldini purchased Grenouille and took
him on as an apprentice. Grenouille made Baldini promise to show him the art of
preserving smells but he soon became disappointed, finding that Baldini’s
methods of distilling were unable to provide what he wanted. Baldini gave
Grenouille papers to travel to Grasse in Provence to study the art of
enfleurage. But once there Grenouille began killing women in secret and trying
to use animal fat to extract their aromatic essence in order to create the
perfect perfume. But as the killings mounted, he became hunted by the
authorities. Perfume comes to a remarkable ending. [PLOT SPOILERS]. Here
Grenouille goes to the executioner’s block but as he stands to greet the crowd
uncorks the bottle of perfume that he has distilled from the murdered girls.
The
resulting scent has such a euphoric effect that people fall in wonderment,
proclaiming Grenouille’s innocence. And then in an extraordinary piece of
cinema, Tykwer choreographs an amazing scene where some 500+ extras in the
central square of Grasse all strip naked and collapse into an orgiastic sea of
bodies, whilst Grenouille walks free. It’s a scene that for an initial moment
teeters on the verge of risibility but where Tykwer then finds his feet and
crafts into a scene that is purely cinematic.
The film then goes out on a
genuinely horrible coda where a despairing Grenouille returns to the fishmarkets
of Paris where he was born, pours the whole of the perfected perfume over
himself and is greeted by the wretches of the marketplace as an angel where they
proceed to tear his body to pieces, thinking that they are consuming something
that is made of pure love. It is one of the most extraordinary endings of a film
that one has seen in quite some time.