Tom Tykwer’s Perfume adaptation is gorgeous, faithful and almost entirely devoid of a pulse

Tom Tykwer’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a film about a man who can smell everything and feel nothing, and the tragedy of the 2006 adaptation is that it often smells the same way. It is cold, exact and beautifully made, and for long stretches it is also inert. The film runs 147 minutes and carries a tagline that promises more than the movie delivers: “Obsession can cause the unthinkable.” The unthinkable arrives. The obsession never quite does.

Trailer, via YouTube Movies.

A €50 Million German Epic

The numbers behind Perfume are as interesting as anything on screen. Producer Bernd Eichinger bought the rights to Patrick Süskind’s 1985 novel in 2000 and began the screenplay with Andrew Birkin. Tykwer joined them in 2003. Principal photography ran from July 12 to October 16, 2005, across Spain, Germany and France. The budget was €50 million, estimated at $60 million, which made it one of the most expensive German films ever mounted.

It grossed more than $135 million worldwide, with more than $53 million of that from Germany alone. Constantin Film released it there on September 14, 2006. Pathé followed in the United Kingdom on December 26, and DreamWorks brought it to the United States on December 27. A co-production of Germany, France, Spain and the United States, it was a genuine international gamble.

Ben Whishaw as Jean-Baptiste Grenouille

The casting of Grenouille took nearly a year. Filming had been planned for the third quarter of 2004, and the search for the lead pushed it. On the advice of casting agent Michelle Guish, Tykwer went to see Ben Whishaw play Hamlet in Trevor Nunn’s production. He felt he had found his actor immediately, and an audition convinced Eichinger.

Eichinger said Whishaw embodied both “the innocent angel and the murderer.” Tykwer’s reasoning was sharper still: “It only really seemed plausible to choose someone for this role who was completely unknown. You could also say a ‘nobody’ who is to become a ‘somebody’ – because that’s what the story is about too.”

That logic is the best thing about the film. Whishaw plays Grenouille as a blank with a gift, and the performance holds because he never asks for sympathy. The film’s first act, in which Grenouille is born in a French fish market and abandoned by a mother who assumes he is stillborn, sets the tone. She is hanged when his cry exposes her. He grows up in an orphanage, detached, with a superhuman sense of smell.

Dustin Hoffman and the Perfume Shop

The middle section is where Perfume should catch fire, and where it most often stalls. Grenouille, now a tanner’s apprentice, delivers to a Paris perfume shop and astonishes the Italian owner Giuseppe Baldini with fragrances he builds without knowing the names or the methods. Dustin Hoffman plays Baldini, the washed-up perfumer, and Tykwer was direct about wanting him: “When I took on this project I knew straight away that there was no one who could play Baldini better.”

Hoffman had wanted to work with Tykwer since Run Lola Run. Hoffman and Whishaw rehearsed for a week and took a crash course in perfume-making before shooting began. Their scenes were shot in sequence so the relationship could develop naturally. Baldini explains that all perfumes are harmonies of twelve scents, with a theoretical thirteenth. He trades Grenouille journeyman papers for 100 new formulas and points him toward Grasse, where another method of capturing scent exists.

Hoffman is the film’s biggest miscalculation. The performance is broad where everything around it is precise, and it breaks the spell.

Alan Rickman as Richis

Alan Rickman was Tykwer’s first choice for Richis, and the role was never offered to anyone else. It shows. Richis is the father of Laure, and Tykwer and Eichinger looked through hundreds of audition tapes to find the right actress for the part. Rickman brings a gravity the film badly needs in its back half, and the mixed reviews that formed around Perfume praised him and Whishaw above everything else, while faulting the screenplay’s unevenness and the casting of Hoffman.

The plot, meanwhile, is a straight line. Grenouille kills a girl selling yellow plums, unintentionally suffocating her when he covers her mouth, then strips her naked and smells her all over, distraught as the scent fades. Her aroma becomes his obsession. The film opens with his sentencing, an angry mob demanding he be killed, and tells the rest in flashback. John Hurt narrates. The structure is sound. The problem is temperature.

A Schedule That Took Six Years

Six years from rights to release, and a year of it spent finding one face. That is not wasted time. Whishaw is the reason to watch Perfume at all.

What the Screenplay Cannot Hold

The screenplay is the weak joint. Tykwer, Birkin and Eichinger had a novel built on a sense no camera can record, and their solution is to show us everything and explain the rest. We get the fish market, the orphanage, the tanner’s yard, the shop, the road to Grasse. We get the murders. What we rarely get is the interior life that makes Grenouille monstrous rather than merely strange.

The source lists the film’s genres as Crime, Fantasy and Drama, and it wears all three labels without committing to any. The visual style is genuinely strong, and the praise for it was earned. But style is doing the work that character should be doing. When a movie’s central figure has no interior, the production design becomes the protagonist.

The casting of Hoffman is the other fault line. Critics flagged it, and they were right to. He is a fine actor giving a performance from a different film, and the imbalance is not his alone. It is a directing problem. Tykwer knows how to move a camera and build a rhythm. He does not, here, know how to hold a tone.

Where the Film Actually Lands

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is worth seeing once, and it is worth seeing for Whishaw and Rickman. Whishaw’s Grenouille is a genuine creation, a man whose gift is also his absence, and the film’s best passages let him work without commentary. Rickman gives the back half a spine. Hurt’s narration is steady and unobtrusive.

Everything else is uneven. The screenplay wanders where it should tighten. Hoffman’s Baldini belongs to a lighter movie. The 147-minute runtime is felt, particularly in the Grasse stretch, where the film’s momentum thins out just as the story should be closing its grip. The tagline sells obsession. The film delivers procedure.

This is a faithful adaptation of a difficult book, and faithfulness is not the same as success. Süskind’s novel works because scent is invisible and the reader has to imagine it. The film makes it visible, and in doing so loses the thing that made the story strange. What remains is handsome, well-acted in two of its four central roles, and emotionally flat.

Metacritic’s published score is 56/100, and that is about right. Perfume is not a failure. In this paper’s view it is a near miss with a great lead performance inside it, and near misses are more frustrating than disasters because you can see exactly what should have been.

56/100

Alan Rickman · Ben Whishaw · film review · Patrick Süskind · Perfume movie · Tom Tykwer