Director: Tom Twyker
Stars: Ben Whishaw, Dustin Hoffman, Alan Rickman
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Whishaw) was born with a heightened sense of smell and he uses this to create fine perfumes. However, his need to create the perfect scent leads to him committing dark and violent acts.
I just checked Perfume: The Story of a Murderer on IMDB and I can’t believe it has a rating of 7.5! This movie is horrible! The one fatal flaw in the concept is that the sense of smells is probably the most difficult sense to convey in a visual medium. It’s why adverts for perfumes are so bizarre and surreal, and I don’t think even they quite succeed at describing the scent with images. Also, when you have people sniffing tissues and the air around them it just looks plain weird. It’s not compelling viewing at all.
Other than that the film is long and boring. The first half an hour could be summed up as ‘this boy smells real good’. There’s also an annoying narrator throughout the film. I didn’t find anything to captivate me here. I tried to give it a chance but I wish I had simply turned it off after the first half hour because I would have saved myself some time.
