Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Fact: there is no movie that Alan Rickman does not make better.

I’m a big fan of Tom Tykwer, who directed Lola Rennt and Der Krieger und die Kaiserin,, two pretty sweet German movies starring Franka Potente on which I have written papers in German (albeit the German of a five-year-old). This is certainly of different stuff than those films, more atmospheric and darker, and I’m not sure if it’s quite as good. I had quite the argument with my friends about the end of the film, which, I’ll admit, is a little ridiculous. It’s a *lot* of slow-motion and the floating handkerchief is a little Forrest Gump feather-in-the-wind, the cheering crowd is a little over-the-top, and there’s pretty much no way to portray a crowd-sized orgy with a straight face. They made the argument that the fantastic nature (as in of the fantasy realm, not as in awesome) of the crowd scene was too out of place in the rest of the film, which had up to that point been relatively realistic. They argued that if Tykwer was going to whip out something like a slow-motion perfume-induced orgy scene, there needed to be something in the first portion of the movie that set up the magical quality of the perfume.

I argued back that Tykwer’s choice actually placed us, the audience, in the same position as the characters in the crowd: suddenly overwhelmed with sensory perception, taken aback with sensations that transcend that which we are accustomed. I’ll admit that I mostly made this argument to play Devil’s Advocate, and I might have gotten a little too into the argument and maybe even a little pissed off due to something that might be PMS, but I at least half like that argument and I refuse to write off Perfume based on the film’s sudden shift in tone of the last twenty minutes. It is a difficult task to attempt capturing scent in a medium based singularly around image and sound; Tykwer manages to accomplish this with impressive success through his use of haunting instrumental music and color. The yellow of the fruit-girl’s plums, the red of Laura’s hair, the lilac fields... if the cinematography of this movie is supposed to be a substitute for smell, it does as well as it could possibly be expected to.

I was actually going to use this entry as an opportunity to rant about my ambivalence about voice-over and the complexity and artistic/philosophical implications inherent in attempting to adapt a novel to film. Ah well, next time. There’s plenty of pretentious rant in me about the complex dichotomy of image/word and time/space and... well, I’ll save it for a time when I can blow my whole pretentious load at once.

Finally, I think this further proves that it’s never a good idea to go into a hedge-maze at night when there’s creepy music. Abandoned alleyways also generally a bad idea. When will people learn.