The senses of our body have their priority of importance. The sensation of sight, touch and listen but throughout the films, the sense of smell has been negated. “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” is a film adapted from the novel written by Patrick Süskind in German which compensates the inhaling pleasures of humans overwhelmingly in the art of movie making. If the Mona Lisa painting can be brought out as a walking angel in a motion picture frame along with its amalgamating tones of colour and whites and the smell of immeasurable satiating scent, then it is Tom Tykwer’s incredible masterpiece set in the 18th century France.
The end the film comes to may not satisfy many. It may not answer many. It also may not mean anything at all, but as the essence of the content, the scent; it vanishes and evaporates in thin air leaving behind some of the memories of those sweet juices of life. It is poetic and dark. There might not be any morality or humanity in Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw) who was thrown out of the vaginal hells of his mother to the hells of earth, in the midst of retched puke and defecating carcass remains of the unknown sea lives. People he meets succumb to the depths of lifelessness directly or indirectly. He wanders like a curse constantly looking for its home only to demolish it half unknowingly and half completely aware. Soon we realize that it is more than a characteristic. It is the natural phenomenon of Grenouille. It is the science unexplained as his gift of miraculously identifying, enjoying and isolating the sensory of smells of substance living and non-living.
And in Ben Whishaw’s skeletal posture of his body and eyes mixing the ambiguity, void and devil creates the fear unexplainable. The fear is set by the ambience rightly captured by the adaptation of Tom Skywer. When Grenouille smells the beauty of the first woman he encounters, the fear is lighted. With John Hurt’s narration, it is a fairy tale, an urban legend and a literary painting of the precious beauty the world has produced. As the camera of Frank Griebe closely journeys through the soft, sensual skins of his first accidental victim (Karoline Herfurth) and Laura (Rachel Hurd-Wood) who is the key final piece to Grenouille’s collection, our heart is smelted with the sensuality of their sweet tender odour and the fear of what his act might be in a note of unpredictability.
While the film does not try to empathize much with the mystical Grenouille, the feel of puzzlement engulfs as it does him in the final sequence. His hunt and quest to capture the eternal scent of women gets accomplished, but what exactly he wanted to get out of it is unknown even to him. From his childhood, there were rejected loves or there is only hatred, ugliness and menial torture. His soul asylum is those tiny sensory organs hidden in his nostrils to provide the momentary gateways to the volcanic eruption of orgasms. But the obsession, denial and negation of his existence make him some one whose survival is the expectance of smelling the captured evanescence of those women. He knows the world would not understand his thirst for it. He believes the art of encapsulating and produce infinite retentiveness of it can be acquired from the experienced perfumer Giuseppe Baldini (Dustin Hoffman in another short but memorable supporting role). But Baldini’s technique is fruitless and Baldini shows the way to the town of Grasse, the birth of scents. There he learns the method but his test materials (beautiful women) end up losing their life by the single hard blow of him.
He commits murder but without any guilt. He covers them with animal fat to absorb their smell without any flinch in his face. For him there lays the raw material with its elegance and resource flourishing so fast to decay in to the realm of non-existence and he quickly performs to it. The “greed” as the narrator defines of Grenouille’s thirst for aroma is not understood at that instant. We fully grasp when the victims roll on like tied pile of woods unfurled over the slope.
I was not fully satisfied with the ending. The hidden connotation and encrypted guilt of his or the love he never got could have been given in better terms of understanding is what I observed. But then I realized the poetical significance of it. The movie as such is the mystical evocation emancipated by the elixir scent produced by Grenouille by the carnal display of this life. The effect as it produces in the final sequence is how the movie generates. We forget the morality and the conscience of the living. We are buzzed in to the paradise of quasi love which appears in veritable tone. The dwindling true mesmerizing hoax is felt but the honesty in its perfume defuses everything remotely resembling the conscience of human.
The end the film comes to may not satisfy many. It may not answer many. It also may not mean anything at all, but as the essence of the content, the scent; it vanishes and evaporates in thin air leaving behind some of the memories of those sweet juices of life. It is poetic and dark. There might not be any morality or humanity in Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw) who was thrown out of the vaginal hells of his mother to the hells of earth, in the midst of retched puke and defecating carcass remains of the unknown sea lives. People he meets succumb to the depths of lifelessness directly or indirectly. He wanders like a curse constantly looking for its home only to demolish it half unknowingly and half completely aware. Soon we realize that it is more than a characteristic. It is the natural phenomenon of Grenouille. It is the science unexplained as his gift of miraculously identifying, enjoying and isolating the sensory of smells of substance living and non-living.
And in Ben Whishaw’s skeletal posture of his body and eyes mixing the ambiguity, void and devil creates the fear unexplainable. The fear is set by the ambience rightly captured by the adaptation of Tom Skywer. When Grenouille smells the beauty of the first woman he encounters, the fear is lighted. With John Hurt’s narration, it is a fairy tale, an urban legend and a literary painting of the precious beauty the world has produced. As the camera of Frank Griebe closely journeys through the soft, sensual skins of his first accidental victim (Karoline Herfurth) and Laura (Rachel Hurd-Wood) who is the key final piece to Grenouille’s collection, our heart is smelted with the sensuality of their sweet tender odour and the fear of what his act might be in a note of unpredictability.
While the film does not try to empathize much with the mystical Grenouille, the feel of puzzlement engulfs as it does him in the final sequence. His hunt and quest to capture the eternal scent of women gets accomplished, but what exactly he wanted to get out of it is unknown even to him. From his childhood, there were rejected loves or there is only hatred, ugliness and menial torture. His soul asylum is those tiny sensory organs hidden in his nostrils to provide the momentary gateways to the volcanic eruption of orgasms. But the obsession, denial and negation of his existence make him some one whose survival is the expectance of smelling the captured evanescence of those women. He knows the world would not understand his thirst for it. He believes the art of encapsulating and produce infinite retentiveness of it can be acquired from the experienced perfumer Giuseppe Baldini (Dustin Hoffman in another short but memorable supporting role). But Baldini’s technique is fruitless and Baldini shows the way to the town of Grasse, the birth of scents. There he learns the method but his test materials (beautiful women) end up losing their life by the single hard blow of him.
He commits murder but without any guilt. He covers them with animal fat to absorb their smell without any flinch in his face. For him there lays the raw material with its elegance and resource flourishing so fast to decay in to the realm of non-existence and he quickly performs to it. The “greed” as the narrator defines of Grenouille’s thirst for aroma is not understood at that instant. We fully grasp when the victims roll on like tied pile of woods unfurled over the slope.
I was not fully satisfied with the ending. The hidden connotation and encrypted guilt of his or the love he never got could have been given in better terms of understanding is what I observed. But then I realized the poetical significance of it. The movie as such is the mystical evocation emancipated by the elixir scent produced by Grenouille by the carnal display of this life. The effect as it produces in the final sequence is how the movie generates. We forget the morality and the conscience of the living. We are buzzed in to the paradise of quasi love which appears in veritable tone. The dwindling true mesmerizing hoax is felt but the honesty in its perfume defuses everything remotely resembling the conscience of human.
3 comments:
Hey, I saw this movie and it was a mere accident that I got this in a DVD. I saw it without any expectations (as u would for any unknown movie) and it definitely kindled a sense of expectation after the first 30 minutes.
A little dragging towards the end and as nicely quoted by you, the end does not mean anything at all
Hey Sabhari,
Thanks for the comments and visit ! The end as such seems dragging because the expectations it creates. I actually liked it for the music and the visual (seriously not for the orgy :-) but for the orchestration of events).
Keep visiting and feedbacks are a welcome gift !
Saw Perfume recently, well done in general, good character building, the story moves along at a good pace... it says a lot about human nature as well.
Post a Comment