Perfume: the Story of a Murderer

This film is visually exciting and intermittently interesting, but finally too long and too cold. Director Tom Tykwer invests the suspenseless murder story with some of the kinetic energy of Run Lola Run, but the effort to squeeze in too much of the Patrick Suskind novel bogs down the proceedings. The depiction of 18th century Paris is picturesquely squalid, the worst smelling place on the planet, more miserable than Victor Hugo could imagine. The main character was born under a fishmonger’s table to a mother who abandoned him there and was subsequently hung for the offense. Besides an incredible instinct for survival, the babe has a preternatural sense of smell, and the film’s most distinctive aspect is the attempt to visualize smells and the act of smelling. After a childhood more Dickensian than the dickens, he goes to Paris and for the first time catches the scents of perfume and of young women, and then in his wild child ways, mishap leads to murder, and thence to a calling. The frail but indomitable Ben Whishaw apprentices himself to parfumeur Dustin Hoffman (in a perfume-y performance whose fragrance may tickle your nose but won’t linger.) From there the film follows him to Provence to complete his education in scent, and mingles the gorgeous with the macabre. Alan Rickman is a local noble who tries to protect his beautiful young daughter from the fate of other beautiful young women who are being murdered serially. With no satisfactory conclusion to the unsavory doings, the film wanders through some spectacular scenes to a vaporous ending. (2006, dvd, n.) *6-* (MC-56.)