re:mote voices

Title:Perfume - The Story of a Murderer
Cast: Ben Whishaw, Dustin Hoffman, Alan Rickman, Rachel Hurd-Wood
Director: tom Twyker

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born, where his siblings died, in the dankest, foulest fish market of Paris. With that first breath he awakens his first sense, and from that point on he has the most incredible power of smell. Every scent is something to be savoured, Jean-Baptiste is not one to discriminate, at least not at first. Raised in an orphanage, sold to a tannery, life is hard. The first time he is taken into town properly, to make a delivery for the tannery, he has his head turned by a multitude of new smells. But through all this cuts one smell - that of a beautiful young woman. In his attempts to explore the full extent of this novelty, he manages to inadvertently kill the woman. But Jean-Baptiste is an obsessive, and he doesn't realise what he has done, merely that he has lost the smell that fascinated him.

It is about the same time that he learns about the art of the perfumer. Men who capture and retain scents. If Jean-Baptiste is to find some way of capturing and keeping a woman's smell forever, then he must become a perfumer! Demonstrating his phenomenal olfactory capability to an old master, he is taken on as an apprentice. Jean-Baptiste hungers for knowledge, hungers for ability, and with each new technique he advances his art a little more. When he spots a young Lady, another flaming red head to remind him of that first girl, he knows that she will be the height of his art. And so, the murder begins.

Perfume is based on the novel by Patrick Suskind and has the subtitle of "the story of a murderer". In the voice over at the start of the film, and in the introduction to the novel, Jean-Baptiste is painted as being incredibly evil. Certainly from the start he is a jinx, death rippling out from contact with the young man. But even when he starts to take an active approach to death, he does so in a detached and obsessive manner, having more of the idiot savant to him than the frenzied slasher. Yet as he perfects his technique of distilling the essence of woman, he leaves terror in his wake - naked, scalped bodies abandoned for people to discover.

Perfume is the second English language film by German director Tom Twyker, following on from Heaven. Twyker really made his mark with his second film Run, Lola, Run, which also gave the world an iconic red head to fixate on. Perfume is quite a departure from the director's normally contemporary work, but it has his eye for detail, his technique in bringing his story to life. France before the discovery of soap is presented is a reeking mire, and the fetid, ugly detail the camera pans across brings that to life. At the same time there is sumptuous beauty, particularly with Jean-Baptiste's two redheads, luminous women.

While I was aware of the novel Perfume and that there was a film adaptation in the works, I admit I had not read the novel, and didn't really know much about it. However finding myself in Zurich while it was showing, and that it had been directed by Twyker I had enough trust in his ability that I knew it would be worth seeing. And he doesn't disappoint, Perfume is magical.