Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) blasts the audience with fast and outrageously colourful images of rotting carcasses, maggots, dung, fruit, flowers, and every living and stinking thing in the world of France of the eighteenth century.  In this reasonably faithful adaptation of Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume, Twyker drenches the viewer in the decadence of pre-revolutionary France, and yet lulls the audience to loving and caring for the unlovable – the psychopath Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a French perfumer murdering women for their scent.

Grenouille (Ben Whishaw) is best able to sense things via smell; at the same time he has no scent of his own. His lack of human scent makes others wary of him and he grows up devoid of feeling or companionship, searching for comfort in finding the perfect scent.  Grenouille’s quest is both Quixotic and disturbing as his psychopathic perspective leads him to destroy all that he desires, in the very act of trying to acquire it. Knowing he cannot be loved without an attractive scent Grenouille does all he can (including murder) to find the most alluring fragrance in the world. This is a villain in every sense, an ancient malevolent spirit who is only appeased by the standard sacrificial virgin. His detachment makes him methodical in his collecting of women and his extraction of their scent. He is a monster who preys on the vulnerable, vampiric in his method of sucking out their essence.  Here it is their odour, not their blood, which is drained, but the outcome for the village is the same, they have a predator in their midst.

Young women of peasant and noble stock are found dead from a blow to the head, their hair cut off, and their bodies naked but ‘intact’, because despite his longing for love, there is no sexual element to Grenouille’s murders. What he does, in search of the ingredients of his perfume, is done in a purely scientific fashion. He had no empathy or consideration for his victims and seems to be unaware of what is destroyed (namely human life) in the process of creation. It is not hard to see a parallel with the pre-revolutionary French aristocracy of this period who were detached, unaware, and lacking empathy for the suffering and deprivation of the poor.

Both the novel and the film retain a fairytale glamour, not in the happy ending sense characteristic of Disney, but more in the darkness of the blood-soaked Grimm's fairy tale where the quest is undertaken and a lesson is learned but there is no triumph of love, only despair and death for the adventurers. The narration by the creepy, yet still sexy, voice of John Hurt seduces us into a world of magic where the murdered virgins act as a metaphor for attempting to do the unthinkable – make stable and eternal the temporary state of youth and beauty and potential. Grenouille sees the women as freshly-bloomed buds, glorious fragrant creatures. On discovering their delectable aroma, he is obsessed with preserving it.

Grenouille learns, through his study of perfuming, the power scent has to invoke memories and feelings, and thus its potential to manipulate and control. To all but Grenouille, scent is an almost invisible, unconscious sense, and he feels superior once he realises that humans are but blindly led by their noses, blissfully unaware of how many of their decisions and actions are based on a primal response to smell. Of course, the downside to Grenouille’s astounding abilities is that without a scent of his own he is invisible to others in an emotional sense. Grenouille sees scent as the key to love, the one factor which is intangible to the rest of humanity but which guides their hearts and loins, makes them act irrationally, and turns them into fools desperate for the possession of the object of their desire.

In all its spectacular imagery, Perfume explores the way love cannot be caught like the scent of a flower, because it is a force always in growth; from the bud to the withered petals, it is ultimately impossible to capture because its own decay is suggested in every bloom.  However, having said that, I cannot walk away from this film without raising a reading of it as an exercise in misogyny. After all, this is a film about violence against women, a glamorisation of their bodies as landscape rather than human; it is about a village’s uproar that their property, their young women, are being taken from them.

Women, and women’s bodies in particular, are reduced to flesh to be inhaled, and their murders never come across as shocking; woman becomes a symbol of nature, an icon of desire itself, rather than a desiring creature. Grenouille's victims have no identity except as victims, and repeated images of their dead bodies are exquisite rather than horrific. Like Grenouille, I remained detached from their misery, their terror, their deaths.  Is Perfume a misogynist text?  If the murderer was a woman and the victims were men would I view it differently?

I admit to also being drawn into empathising with Charlize Theron’s portrayal of the serial killer Aileen Wuornos in 2003’s fictionalised biopic Monster. Wournos initially began her murder spree after a particularly violent rape, and her murders are akin to exacting vengeance towards the constant violence, especially sexual, that is routinely committed against women. At first, her murders seem understandable, perhaps even justified, in the context of self-defence.  Her 'victims' were mainly violent, rapist, criminal men, and they experienced not beauty, nor even tragedy, only the ugly devastation of the mythical Furies seeking revenge against men for their mistreatment of women.  If in Monster Wournos has taken it upon herself to be the avenging angel of all victimised women, then in Perfume is Grenouille reacting to his exclusion from the world of feeling, and hence the world of women?  In The Silence of the Lambs (1991) the killer was collecting parts to make a woman suit, in Perfume is he is making an invisible scent to cloak himself in woman’s power and allure.

Is Perfume therefore a queer film?  Is Grenouille a transsexual figure – neither existing as a man or a woman, unable to even smell himself, is he invisible to himself, because he misses that crucial quality, a personal aroma?  In Süskind’s original novel, Grenouille realises much earlier in life that he lacks a scent and he creates a human perfume (not made from people but imitating the scent of them) that makes it easier for him to interact with other people.  Tykwer leaves out this part of the story, making Grenouille isolated from others for the entire film, thus making him less of a misogynist monster and more a pitiable, lonely and lost creature. Once he completes his masterpiece, he discovers its terrifying power. The essence of  thirteen women is the most intoxicating scent in the world and could make him more powerful than he could dream. However, his desire is not to be alone anymore but to be at one with humanity; he does not really want to be invincible, but to be vulnerable, and to be loved. He learns that love requires a sacrifice of his own, instead of more sacrificial virgins. Ultimately, Perfume promotes the principles of feminism because it is suggests the immorality of men desiring women simply for the pleasure that they will bring. Such selfishness dooms love because it turns a human interaction into a transaction where the woman delivers a service, until she is unable to give anymore, until her love dies, because it has not been sustained, but instead she has been drained.


Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
2006

Director: Tom Tykwer
Screenwriters: Andrew Birkin, Bernd Eichinger, & Tom Tykwer adaptation from the novel Das Parfum by Patrick Süskind
Cinematographer: Frank Griebe
Editor: Alexander Berner
Original Music: Reinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek, & Tom Tykwer
Cast: Ben Whishaw, Dustin Hoffman, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Alan Rickman, John Hurt