RG
Roberto Giacomelli
•France, 18th century. Jean Baptiste Grenouille is a boy born with extraordinary olfactory abilities, capable of perceiving every odor, even those imperceptible to the human nose. Jean Baptiste, orphaned at birth, grows up in an orphanage, but as soon as he is a teenager, he is sold as a slave in a tannery. During this period, the boy meets Giuseppe Baldini, an Italian perfumer who teaches him how to create perfumes and reveals the techniques for capturing the scent of things, but unsatisfied, Jean Baptiste goes to the nearby city of Grasse to learn the technique of defleurage; however, obsessed with the creation of the perfect and sublime odor, the boy begins to kill young women and then treat their corpses to extract their perfume.
Tom Tykwer had already demonstrated that he was a good director with quite original qualities since his very particular "Lola Runs," which in 1998 brought him to the public's attention; but now with "Perfume," he attempts the impossible: bringing Patrick Suskind's novel to the screen, a written work that bases all its strength and originality on the description of olfactory sensations; an enterprise that even Stanley Kubrick had only conceived but never realized!
It might have seemed like madness to make a credible and stimulating film about an olfactory story, unless cinema theaters were equipped with technology capable of reproducing odors for the audience. Well, Tykwer succeeded in transforming that bestseller into a film worthy of its paper parent, a film that follows the simplest path for describing odors, namely the simple hinting at odors. The film's protagonist is tormented by the scent of a young woman; he even dreams about it, sniffs, and manipulates essences and essential oils, but we can do nothing else but admire his feats and observe, from time to time, the dilating and contracting of his nostrils, imagining the perfumed essence that is dissected from the white and greasy bodies of the young and naked dead maidens that Jean Baptiste surrounds himself with. All of this may seem banal, but it works wonderfully!
The path taken by Tykwer is, however, very far from the usual canons of the thriller, and this is evident from the first images of the film, in which we witness the birth of Jean Baptiste: an unpleasant and visually powerful scene that shows the child's birth in a filthy local market, in a triumph of splatter and foul-smelling dirt that serves as input to the child's abilities, as if it were the birth of a Marvel comic superhero. The film continues halfway between drama and grotesque comedy, then plunges into horror thriller with the hunt for the fragrant maidens and ends in a surreal and excessively grotesque epilogue, bordering on the oniric. Subjecting oneself to the viewing of "Perfume" therefore means witnessing several different films stitched together by a single narrative thread; it is a wholly singular experience that leaves the viewer with a sense of profound and complacent satisfaction.
If analyzed from a more purely technical aspect, "Perfume" still comes out a winner. Costing millions and millions of euros, this Franco-German coproduction exploits a sumptuous and realistic scenographic reconstruction and mass scenes (the final orgy) of great visual impact. Much also depends on Tykwer's virtuosic direction, which manages to create original and technically flawless camera movements with tracking shots and long takes of great suggestion; no less is Frank Griebe's photography, capable of remaining credible and at times unsettling both in the darkest scenes and in those in the sunlight. A good job is also done by the cast, in which the protagonist Ben Whishaw ("The Merchant of Venice"; "The Pusher") stands out, who appears at times bewildered, completely dominated by his ability, at times immersed in a lucid madness that turns into a desire for omnipotence; excellent, as always, Dustin Hoffman as the sympathetic and haughty penniless perfumer Baldini.
If we want to criticize the film, noticeable also in the novel, it is in the excessive grotesque that permeates the entire ending, so surreal and pompous, not only ironic but also distant from the general tone of the work.
"Perfume" is therefore a film to be watched for sure, but with the awareness of venturing into a universe of oddities and different styles; there is little or no horror, but the film is certainly appreciated by fans of horror cinema for the substantial dose of macabre necrophilic erotica and some splashes of grotesque splatter.
It's a duty to give half a point more!
