Synopsis: Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is gifted with a great sense of smell. He can literary smell better than a dog. His story begins from when he was born in the fish market all the way through his childhood, growing up in an orphanage. He eventually gets sold to a tannery where he worked or more like survived, until he was around 16 or 18? He makes a delivery to a master perfumer, Baldini whose trying to unlock the ingredients of a rival perfume. Jean-Baptiste does it with ease and makes the perfume even better! Baldini buys him from the the tannery guy then uses Jean-Baptiste to create the most beautiful perfumes Paris has ever smelt. Except Jean-Baptiste isn't happy with his life of perfuming. He wants to make the ultimate perfume, a perfume that captures the essense of a woman's beauty. Conventional methods are impossible so he travels to some other place to study the art of preserving scent. He learns that the only way to preserve a woman's scent is to own them first then cut them up. Oh, it's grim alright, but Jean-Baptiste will stop at nothing to create the ultimate perfume. Should You Watch It? Well, this movie is based on a best selling novel so you know that the story is going to be good. The thing is, this movie is pretty artsy and it doesn't really talk about how Jean-Baptiste uses his perfume to get power and whatever. The entire movie is about him owning these woman in the process of making this perfume and how the town is trying to hunt him down. I'm not going to tell you how it ends, obviously, but let's just say that the theme of this movie is greed destroys all, literary.
Things to Watch Out For: Jean-Baptiste is obviously the protagonist in this film but it doesn't really feel like it. He doesn't really talk and he's a bit crazy with his obsession. He doesn't really interact with any other character other than Baldini at first. His whole being is obsessed with this ultimate perfume. As a result, Jean-Baptiste isn't the greatest hero in film and you might have a hard time liking the ending because of it.
Things You Don't Expect: I guess perfume provokes a kind of euphoria and euphoria is tied into sexual pleasure. So, in a sense, perfume, if strong enough, can evoke the same kind of sexual pleasure in people. So this movie has a lot of sexual content. Not in the beginning or the middle, but a big way in the end. So, this isn't a movie to watch with the kids.
Final Comments:
Story: 7.0 (Patrick Suskind: Novel)
Direction: 7.5 (Tom Tykwer)
Acting: 7.2
Cinematography: 7.8
Music/Sound: 6.8
Final Score: 7.0
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