Perfume

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006)

Directed by: Tom Tykwer
Written by: Tom Tykwer, Andrew Birkin & Bernd Eichinger based on the novel Das Parfum by Patrick Süskind
Starring: Ben Whishaw, Alan Rickman, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Dustin Hoffman, Karoline Herfurth, narrated by John Hurt

Okay, that was weird. Don't get me wrong, I liked it, but it was really, really weird.

The life of this guy who has an extraordinary sense of smell and, in order to make the most powerful perfume in the world, he has to learn how to preserve the scent of people. Sound fuckin creepy? He extracts the scent of the beautiful girls he murders and eventually puts this perfume together. It really is the strongest perfume in the world.

I thought the concentrated smell of a person (a bunch of people, actually) would be totally disgusting, but apparently not.

So that was pretty majorly fucked up, but very good. It's hard to do smell in a movie because, obviously, films are visual, but they do it extremely well. The smells in the movie are revoltingly vivid and weirdly poetic or something.

And I liked that it was fucked up. It went above and beyond the limits of twisted, for me, and certainly did stand out.

It was a weird jumble of stuff, too. It wasn't always creepy and horrible. Sometimes it was kinda funny. Or maybe that was just Dustin Hoffman. Holy Jesus he was bad. He reminded me of Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice, only much much worse. And he and Alan Rickman are starting to look eerily similar, but we'll not go there right now.

The main guy, Ben Whishaw, never seen him before but he was really good. He barely said two words in the whole movie, the character has no social skills, but he was really good. Creepy as hell. Most people without social skills are a little bit creepy to me anyway, but... well...

Um, yeah, a little on the startling side, but what do expect from a movie rated for 'aberrant behaviour involving nudity'. Weird, weird weird.

Yeah, it looked great, it was wacky enough to keep me interested, the acting outside of Dustin Hoffman was good (inside of Dustin Hoffman it's too dark to tell?). So... good movie. But weird.

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