Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is still playing at cinemas in Seoul. It’s been out for some time now so this week may be your last chance to catch it on the big screen.
The film is based on Patrick Suskind’s novel of the same title. It tells the fictional story of an 18th-century Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, who is born with the best sense of smell in human history. His nose is so powerful he can even “see” what people are doing when they are out of sight.
Grenouille’s gift turns into a curse when he becomes obsessed with the lost scent of a beautiful young woman. From that point on he dedicates his life to recapturing and preserving that smell. It is a quest that leads him to mass murder.
The film is a fairly close adaptation of Suskind’s novel. Sections of the story were abridged or tidied up for the sake of running time, but there were no gratuitous deviations from the plot.
Having read the book before seeing the film I was a little bored in the cinema. The cinematography was nothing out of the ordinary and so didn’t make up for knowing how it would all end.
What I did like was the griminess of the makeup and costumes. This is one of the few period films I’ve seen in recent times that suggests what life was like before people owned more than one suit of clothing, used deodorant and had daily baths. In this the film makers were also following the lead of Suskind’s novel.
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