FSF Magazine, June 2007 by Spilogale Authors

Author:Spilogale Authors [Authors, Spilogale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spilogale, Inc.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Films: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by David J. Skal

The word “synesthesia” signifies a confusion of the senses—a fascinating phenomenon often associated with psychedelic states in which one can taste music, for instance, or visualize smell. In the latter regard, the long-awaited film version of Patrick Süskind's 1985 bestseller Perfume: The Story of a Murderer qualifies as synesthetic cinema of an ambitious order, using every filmmaker's trick short of Smell-o-Vision or Odorama to convince an audience that it's actually smelling something onscreen, or at least identifying with a protagonist who can smell things no mortal has ever sniffed before.

Long considered unfilmable (no less a filmmaker than Stanley Kubrick is said to have thrown up his hands at the very thought of the task), ten million euros for the screen rights to Perfume seems to have been incentive enough for Süskind to come to all of his senses and allow director Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola, Run) to craft an impressive, if in many ways problematic, photoplay.

Both novel and film tell the vampirish tale of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (the surname means frog), “one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.” Born barely alive in the stinking squalor of a Paris fish market in 1738, Grenouille is possessed of a superhuman olfactory sense, while personally possessing no corporeal scent. Since nature famously discriminates against vacuums, Grenouille compensates by obsessively studying and collecting all the scents of the world, a self-taught activity that leads him, inexorably (how else, in a story like this?), to become the apprentice of a flamboyantly has-been master perfumer, under whose selfish tutelage he learns the basic techniques of scent distillation in a crumbling mansion precariously perched on a bridge over the Seine. With Grenouille's help, the perfumer regains his former glory, only to be killed when his structurally challenged house unceremoniously collapses into the river.

With sexual maturation Grenouille becomes acutely aware of female scents. He accidentally kills a young woman he has stalked, and, having had the opportunity to appreciate the intoxicating aroma of her corpse, fully realizes the meaning and purpose of his life. Grenouille rapidly becomes a serial killer with bloodhound-ish instincts rivaling those of Hannibal Lecter. He moves to the perfume center of Grasse in the south of France, and there applies the advanced techniques of scent capture to the task of distilling, alongside his day job, an ultimate, elusive fragrance stolen from the corpses of virginal women.

With each murder he compounds and intensifies the mystical scent, finally incorporating it into his very being. He becomes a monster both messianic and misanthropic. When captured by the authorities and sentenced to die, he unleashes the fragrance, which brings the men and women of Grasse to their adoring knees, followed by a public orgy unprecedented in human history. The traumatized townsfolk completely erase from consciousness Grenouille, his crimes, and most important, their own transgressions. His life's work complete, Grenouille returns to Paris, dousing himself with the

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