Review: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Review: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) – Directed by Tom Tywker

Length: 147 minutes

Starring: Ben Whishaw, Alan Rickman, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Dustin Hoffman

The thing about smell is that it’s all about language and memory. Perfume feels like it should belong to the school of magic realism, but it disappointingly fails to be as fantastical as it could be. One of the ironies about smell is that it takes language to describe it, something that the anti-hero Grenouille (Ben Whishaw), lacks and attempts to make up for by bottling every scent in the world. As for the link between memory and smell, Perfume wastes this opportunity at every turn.

When I hear the gravelled tones of John Hurt at the beginning of a movie, my brain begins a ten minute melt down from which I rarely recover. In the case of Perfume my recovery was not forthcoming. Grenouille is born literally into the blood and guts of a Paris fish market with an extraordinary talent – an amazing sense of smell. An encounter with a street woman leads to the belief that he needs to bottle the scent of a woman and he takes instruction from the perfumier, Baldini (Dustin Hoffman). When Grenouille realises he has learnt all that he can learn, he travels to the country where he perfects his scent capturing techniques and sets about his murderous designs.

All the performances are exacting and even the standard Rickman performance holds up. Frustratingly, Perfume is interrupted by Hurt’s needless narration. Movies that require narration are generally fairy tales, or in instances where a story teller is used as part of the plot. The movie only really gains pace in the last third when Grenouille begins his murderous path in earnest but strangely as this begins to happen, the film’s focus is switched from him, to the towns-people’s search for him as a killer and in particular Rickman and his daughter Laura (Rachel Hurd-Wood).

Put quite simply, if Perfume had shown a little more humour, been a little more circumspect and creative, ditched the frightfully dumb John Hurt narration and been made in French, we’d all be shouting it’s name from the trees. A missed opportunity.